Education

Go With the Flow

Project Most's upcoming STEAM workshop for kids ages 3 and 4 is all about mixing paints and watching how the colors move and change. It will be held on Saturday, June 5, starting at 9:30 a.m. At 10:45 that morning, kids in kindergarten through the third grade can turn milk cartons into cars, and at 12:30 p.m., fourth through sixth graders can learn about water striders (a type of water bug) and take a challenge to make their own.

Part of what makes imaginative play at Hayground School so unique comes before recess even begins. The playground's new rainbow climber, a work in progress, crystalizes this special environment, one in which students are having hands-on involvement in the design and creation of a play space to best serve their imaginations. Sometimes that means mixing concrete as a 10-year-old.

The Bridgehampton School District on Wednesday evening appointed a new superintendent, Mary T. Kelly, who was chosen from a field of 21 applicants.

"A number of issues that the district thought compromised the safety of our students" need to be addressed ahead of any contract renewal, the Sag Harbor School District superintendent told residents who are disappointed in the lack of compromise on a new contract between the district and Mashashimuet Park.

Joanne Goerler didn't want to retire in January from her teaching job at the John M. Marshall Elementary School, where she had worked since 1989, but she didn't really have a choice. The Covid-19 pandemic posed a life-threatening risk to her immune system, which had been compromised by a blood cancer called myelodysplastic syndrome, a surprise diagnosis Ms. Goerler received in the spring of 2018 after having some routine bloodwork.

Springs School officials want everyone to know they can't use the school's brand-new soccer and baseball fields just yet because the sod is too fresh, and they want all-terrain vehicle drivers to know that there cannot be any riding across the fields at all.

To that end, the district will soon erect a fence around the new fields and will install security cameras at key places -- with an eye to catching the license plates of offenders.

Project Most’s annual plant sale will be Saturday at the Neighborhood House at 92 Three Mile Harbor Road in East Hampton, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. There will organic vegetables seedlings, herbs, and flowers grown by its after-school students.

One can only wonder what Margaret Olivia Slocum Sage, Sag Harbor's greatest philanthropist of the early 20th century, might think of the newly emerged rift between two village institutions: the Sag Harbor School District, for which Mrs. Sage donated money to build what is now Pierson Middle and High School, and Mashashimuet Park, another one of her gifts to the people of the village.

All About Frogs and Bats

Who doesn't love frogs? Today at 4 p.m., through the East Hampton Library, the Quogue Wildlife Refuge will offer an up-close look via Zoom at Long Island frog species for children of all ages. Bats, though, might be a different story. These often-misunderstood creatures will be the subject of another library Zoom session, this one on Tuesday at 4 p.m. Sign-up information is online at easthamptonlibrary.org, or by phone at 631-324-0222, extension 2.

Two years after banning the intentional release of balloons, the East Hampton Town Board appears poised to go further by also enacting a ban on the sale and distribution of filled latex and Mylar balloons.

While turnout was low almost across the board, the vast majority of voters in all but one local school district gave their stamp of approval to their districts' budgets on Tuesday. The Bridgehampton School District fell just short of the 60-percent supermajority of voter approval it needed to pass an over-the-tax-cap budget proposal of $20.66 million, but other districts — including East Hampton, Montauk, and Amagansett — saw budgets pass with more than 80 percent voter approval.

"We're in such a better place," said Adam Fine, the assistant superintendent of the East Hampton School District, summing up the progress since the beginning of the pandemic. As Covid cases taper down and outdoor celebrations start to ramp up, signs that we're turning a corner in the pandemic are everywhere in local schools — and gratefully so, administrators and students say.