After a month that saw huge spikes in enterococcus bacteria levels at test sites throughout East Hampton Town, thanks mostly to runoff from recent thunderstorms, the Aug. 29 weekly water-quality report from Concerned Citizens of Montauk lists only one site out of 32 with entero levels considered risky to human health: Accabonac Harbor, east of the Old Stone Highway culvert in Springs.

In this photograph, 12-year-old Mary Huntting Rattray (1927-2016) appears just past her ankles in the surf as she enters the ocean at Napeague in 1939.

The arrival of September isn't just about school supplies and classroom assignments -- it's also time to sign up for after-school activities, and for children and teens who enjoy dancing, or want to learn, opportunities are plentiful here.

Ayanna El, LeBron Napier, Bryan Solano, and Melanie Valladares are the recipients of this year’s scholarships from Organizacion Latino-Americana of Eastern Long Island (OLA).

Every summer, Charlie Soriano, principal of East Hampton Middle School, picks a theme that sets the tone for students and staff to have a successful school year. The theme for 2022-23 is “perseverance,” and to prepare for classroom discussions of this, students have been asked to read the poem “Harlem” by Langston Hughes.

The crowd of children and adults early on Friday afternoon, hours before its official reopening, were a clear indication that the renovated Lars Simenson Skatepark in Montauk is a hit. "What happened was a very organic process of people just building enthusiasm, community coming together . . . until we ended up with something that is world class," said a member of the Montauk Skatepark Coalition.

South Fork school districts have been beyond busy scooping up all the qualified teachers, teaching assistants and aides, special-education therapists, mental health providers, and substitutes they possibly can ahead of the first bell this year. Since May, school district records show that between Montauk and Bridgehampton, at least 50 teachers have been hired across various academic disciplines — most to replace people who retired, some to launch new programs.

There is no vaccine to help prevent Lyme disease, which is transmitted through the bite of an infected deer tick, but that may soon change. In early August, the drug company Pfizer announced that it was seeking 6,000 people ages 5 and older to enroll in its phase 3 trial for a new Lyme vaccine. Separately, there's work underway using MRNA vaccine technology to make bites quickly itchy and red, so that they are easily noticed and the ticks can be removed before the transmit disease.

When David Plotkin collapsed while biking on Indian Wells Beach in Amagansett, bystanders and lifeguards jumped into action, helping to perform CPR for 15 minutes as they waited for an ambulance. That Mr. Plotkin survived is thanks to their quick action.

East End Presbyterians are facing a unique challenge this year as six churches here are without a full-time pastor — and everyone’s trying to find one.

Sometimes time telescopes and a personage from one epoch appears in a contemporary context causing cognitive dissonance: Harriet Tubman, for example, lived until the age of the Model T Ford. And so it was perhaps with some puzzlement, if not awe, that Hamptons art-world habitués must have regarded the Ukrainian poet and painter David Burliuk, the “Father of Russian Futurism,” when he appeared in the somewhat poky-prosaic setting of art openings at Guild Hall at midcentury.

In such a small village, enrollment has always come in waves. This is something that Lauren Thayer has seen firsthand in her role not just as Sagaponack School Board president, but also as an alumna herself and a parent of two former Sagg students. “I think of it as a positive. . . . It’s the chance that parents dream of” for their children, she said.

On Aug. 22, Surfrider’s Blue Water Task Force tested the water off Windmill Beach in Sag Harbor and recorded its highest level of enterococcus, a “fecal indicator,” in a year. It was 150 times the number used by the Suffolk Health Department to close a beach, but the beach remained open, with no signs alerting parents or casual tourists that the water should be avoided.

Many people know by now that Southampton Town has “opted in” to open cannabis dispensaries and consumption lounges one of these days, but less known is that the town is now hosting the East End’s only psychedelic healing center.

An informational meeting about emergency and personal wireless communications in Springs is scheduled for Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. at the Springs Firehouse.

The Great Bonac 10K and 5K races, an annual fixture in Springs that the late Howard Lebwith began in 1977, but which have not been held since 2019, are again to be contested Monday, with the Springs Firehouse on Fort Pond Boulevard serving as the races’ staging area.

M&T Bank has promised a smooth transition for customers who bank with People’s United Bank but now find themselves in the midst of the nuts and bolts of M&T’s long-anticipated final takeover of People’s, happening this weekend.

Hero Beach has always been eager to serve food on premises. At first, the resort sought to convert an entire building to a restaurant. The East Hampton Town Planning Board was against that, but eventually came around to a revised version of the plans — the conversion of two basement units to a kitchen for food service to overnight visitors and their guests — although the board's decision was not unanimous.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency proposed on Friday the designation of two widely used perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS, as hazardous substances under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, also known as CERCLA or Superfund.

Former President Donald Trump will appear at a fund-raiser for Representative Lee Zeldin, the Republican and Conservative Parties’ nominee for governor of New York, on Sunday in Deal, N.J.