Education

Meet the Animals

At the South Fork Natural History Museum in Bridgehampton, the Young Birders Club, for kids 8 to 18, meets on Saturday at 10 a.m. On Sunday, children 6 to 8 can get an up-close introduction to the museum’s reptiles and amphibians in a program at 10:30 a.m.

Puppets at Bay Street

The Sag Harbor School District was poised this week to send a letter to a New York State judge in support of delaying the start of the statewide elimination of the religious exemption for vaccines for schoolchildren but reversed its position on Tuesday.

Bill O’Hearn, who served as head of school at the Ross School in East Hampton from 1998 to 2003 and most recently was in charge of the upper school, has been reappointed as head of school, the Ross School announced this week.

Ahead of next month’s start of classes, several local school districts have received updated certificates of occupancy following inspections conducted by fire marshals in East Hampton Town, East Hampton Village, and Southampton Town.

The East Hampton School District took its first step this week toward installing solar panels and other energy-efficiency upgrades, having recently received the go-ahead from the State Education Department.     

After auditors said late last year that the Sag Harbor School District had missed out on hundreds of thousands of dollars in New York State funding for summer special education programs, district administrators came to a different conclusion: They had overestimated the amount of money they were due to collect.   

The Springs School District got a financial boost from New York State this week when Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. stopped by the school to present a check for an extra $50,000 from state coffers.     

Long after William Kiraizis of Springs retired from the William Floyd High School, his marine science lesson comes full circle.

Camp Shakespeare

The Hamptons Shakespeare Festival’s Camp Shakespeare, a theater arts program for ages 8 to 15, will celebrate its 20th season when it gets under way on Monday in Amagansett.

When Jack Perna began working in the Montauk School District, the price of gas was around 39 cents per gallon and a slice of pizza cost about 35 cents. The year was 1973.

Mr. Perna was a fourth-grade teacher at the time, and has since risen to the role of district superintendent and principal. He received a pay raise and one-year contract extension, through June of 2020, from the Montauk School Board during its annual organization meeting on July 9. The 2019-20 school year marks his 24th at the helm of the district.

Bay Street Theater’s summer programs for kids in the coming weeks include a puppet camp for little ones, musical theater, Shakespeare workshops, and master classes and musical immersion for teens.

The Sag Harbor and Sagaponack School Districts have renewed a contract to share busing services again come September, but the agreement looks a bit different from the one signed about a year ago.