The Ulster BOCES whistle-stop tour of local school districts hit Saugerties recently as Superintendent Charles Khoury shared plans for a $39-million capital project for improvements at their Port Ewen and New Paltz locations. Should districts like Saugerties approve the plan, Khoury said, they would have greater flexibility over how to structure financing.
Saugerties Central School District Business Manager Jane St. Amour recently detailed a potential $12.5-million budget gap by 2026 as part of a long-range financial projection presented to the Board of Education.
It’s time to teach kids in the New Paltz Middle School a skill that is new to many of them: how to use a locker. Those icons of life in public school have been off-limits since students have returned to the halls, because no one was sure how to keep the little ones six feet apart during that chaotic period between classes. The answer will be tight-fisted control over who gets to what lockers, and when.
A compilation of the latest sports news in the Kingston, Saugerties, Onteora and New Paltz school districts.
The search firm hired by Onteora to find a new superintendent will soon be seeking public input and holding stakeholder meetings as it begins to hone in on a field of candidates. A community survey will soon be posted on the district website, onteora.k12.ny.us, and stakeholder meetings via Zoom will be scheduled for November 30, December 1 and December 2.
School officials in the Saugerties Central School District are leaning toward closing Mount Marion Elementary School should they go ahead with plans to reconfigure their schools to address a dwindling student population and a looming $12.5 million budget gap over the next four years.
The Kingston City School District’s Board of Education earlier this month unanimously approved spending $1.5 million to install air-conditioning in
Drawing upon a program New Paltz teacher Melissa Feldmann experienced growing up, she is putting in place an in-school postal system. Students — and teachers and administrators — will be able to write letters to one another, maintaining social connections even among people no longer sharing the same classroom. Those letters will be sorted and delivered by some of the same children who will be learning a particular set of communication skills that can feel forgotten in an age of text messages and tweets.
It seems like there’s always construction somewhere on campus at SUNY New Paltz. That fact can slip under the radar because what’s built on state land isn’t subject to Planning Board review like every other project in New Paltz, because local zoning rules do not have to be considered in any way.
For the first time in generations, there are going to be significant renovations to the facilities under control of the Ulster County Board of Cooperative Educational Services, better known as BOCES. The open question is how the bills for the project are to be paid. BOCES administrators came to the November 3 School Board meeting in New Paltz to explain alternatives: either trustees of the eight school boards in the county decide how to finance their proportional share, or county voters can decide on a bond package by voting on a referendum.