Green Light Bus Depot
The East Hampton School District is officially moving ahead with plans to build a bus maintenance barn and refueling facility on the high school campus, with the school board saying Tuesday it has selected the Cedar Street side of the property as the site.
The announcement followed news late last month that the property on Route 114 where the district has its current bus barn has been sold after being on the market just one week.
The Cedar Street end of the property, where the district currently has a handful of equipment storage buildings, was one of five potential sites at the high school evaluated by school officials. It was chosen because it would not require chopping up an athletic field and because it does not abut Long Lane, two things that many community members had told school officials they opposed.
Cedar Street is “the best way for us to go forward. We have to do something and this process is going to take a long time,” J.P. Foster, the school board president, said. “If we start today, we’re looking at breaking ground in the spring of 2019. We have to do the [environmental] determinations. Our architect has a lot to do. We’re now moving forward.”
The announcement Tuesday came with pledges from school officials to keep the project’s impact as minimal as possible for the school’s residential neighbors.
Richard Burns, East Hampton’s superintendent, said after the meeting the district plans to invest in electric engine warmers for its buses so that drivers won’t have to let them idle on cold mornings. He said the district will also use the front of the school for additional bus parking, and that a rotating refueling schedule will be worked out to limit the amount of bus traffic at the refueling facility each day.
The decision was reached without much public discussion from the school board on Tuesday, but Mr. Burns said the bulk of it took place during the board’s facilities committee meetings, which are open to the public and take place monthly on Thursday mornings. The committee was to meet again today.
“What we’re finding out is we have to figure out a way of incorporating the buildings that are there already,” Mr. Burns said. “We’re just starting to put this together.”
The district has estimated a maintenance facility could cost about $4.75 million and would have to be financed via bond referendum.
During Tuesday’s meeting, the school board also approved a contract to hire Mr. Burns’s daughter, Caitlin Burns, for occasional testing of students for whom English is not a native language. The testing is done upon students’ arrival to place them in appropriate classes. Elizabeth Reveiz, the district’s director of bilingual programs, said it is difficult to hire someone for this role because the service is not needed regularly. In the past 10 months, she said, the district has had four different people performing the testing.
“It’s hard to hire someone when you don’t know when you’re going to need them,” Ms. Reveiz said. “We’re actually really grateful that this young lady is coming in. She has a working knowledge of Spanish and understands cultural diversity. . . . It’s such a sporadic position that people say, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ ”
Mr. Burns also addressed the jump in price for driver’s education, which rose from $550 last year to $650 this year. He said the district had pledged to pay a fixed amount of money for the program based on a bidding process, but that enrollment in the program had dropped, thereby increasing the cost for each student taking the course.