Schoolhouse Plan Advances

Plans to move the original Amagansett schoolhouse, built in 1802 by Samuel Schellinger, a millwright, are proceeding. At a meeting on Tuesday, Eleanor Tritt, the district’s superintendent, told the school board that the State Department of Education’s Office of Facilities Planning had approved the installation of a foundation for the schoolhouse, which is believed to be the oldest on eastern Long Island.

“We’re very excited,” Ms. Tritt told the board. “Now we’re just waiting for the last legal paperwork.” Once the ground softens, she said, the foundation will be set. The plan is for the building to be moved to the school grounds from its present site, the Atlantic Avenue property owned by Huntington and Adelaide Sheldon, who announced their intention to donate it in October.

If all proceeds according to schedule, a “grand opening ceremony” will happen in the late spring or early summer, Ms. Tritt said.

The schoolhouse was originally on “Amagansett Street,” now Montauk Highway, about opposite today’s school building. It was moved to the west side of Atlantic Avenue, at what is now the southern part of the East End Cemetery, in 1864, and moved again in 1881, when it was auctioned to Marcus Hand. Mr. Hand sold it to Capt. Joshua B. Edwards, who moved it across the street to his backyard, which is now part of the Sheldon property.

In addition to a discussion of the 2015-16 budget and tuition rate, covered separately in this issue, the board announced that spring recess will be abbreviated, owing to the number of snow days this winter. Classes will be held on April 9 and 10. Unless families have travel plans that cannot be changed, students are expected to attend school on those days.

Ms. Tritt referred to education topics in the news, citing two recent articles in The New York Times. “If an Algorithm Wrote This, How Would You Even Know?” was, she said, “very sobering.” The article describes a new industry of automated narrative generation, in which algorithms and language generators create written content. This “is really going to be a challenge for all of our educators to help children research and really probe and think carefully about the information they are reading,” and its source, she said. “It gave me great pause to see what’s happening out there.”

Another article described the criticism leveled at Pearson Education, a publisher, for monitoring social media to identify students who might be leaking information about the tests it creates and administers. Administrators and educators, Ms. Tritt said, must “continue to be vigilant about what we allow students to do,” citing Pearson and other companies’ data-mining efforts and the questions of privacy those efforts raise. Parents, she said, must also “be aware of the consequences of what children are putting out there.”

Victoria Handy, the board’s president, opened the meeting by acknowledging the recent death of two former students, Eric Payne and Andrew MacNiven. Both Mr. Payne, who was 25, and Mr. MacNiven, who was 24, died on March 15. “It’s very sad,” Ms. Handy said. “Our hearts go out to their families.”

“I didn’t know Eric,” Ms. Tritt said, “but Andrew stands out in my mind, a wonderful young man who had everything to live for.” The school yearbooks in which the graduates were featured were displayed during the meeting.