BOE talks snow days, school bus cameras and auditorium redo

PINE PLAINS — From this year’s snow days to the long-awaited school bus cameras, the Pine Plains Central School District Board of Education (BOE) addressed the latest news at its meeting on Wednesday, Nov. 4.

The BOE met via Zoom due to the COVID pandemic; it can be viewed at www.ppcsd.org.

Superintendent of Schools Martin Handler brought up the recent snowfall and the COVID-19 Snow Day Pilot Program the New York State Education Department (NYSED) established for the 2020-21 school year. A letter from the NYSED director of education finance sent to school superintendents and other administrators statewide this past September explained the one-year pilot was launched to enable school districts to “pivot to remote instruction to provide continuity of instruction on what would otherwise be a day of school closure due to a snow emergency.”

When the BOE talked about the program five weeks ago, Handler said it was unanimous in that doesn’t want to use the program. After checking with the state, Handler said districts don’t have to formally opt into the program: instead, they can casually join the program, and at the end of the school year, when reporting snow days, they can report which days were full remote instruction days due to weather.

“We don’t have to take any formal action, but obviously I would like to do what you would like me to do,” Handler said, adding that if any BOE members want to propose a change, they can talk about it.

After reminding the BOE that the school district has snow days built into its calendar, Handler said what he might suggest is that they use the snow days when they need to, and if it looks like they’re running out of snow days, they can jump in and join the pilot program.

BOE member Jean Stapf asked Handler whether the district is still responsible for delivering lunches to students if it turns a school day into a full remote instruction day. Handler replied they would have to cross that bridge later, though he added they would be responsible unless the weather worsened to the point where the district’s vans or buses should not be on the roads.

“If we’re going to do this, if we’re going to at least have the possibility of it, we better give the parents the heads up and say ‘Hey, if we have to do this, please know that the meals won’t be forthcoming,’” Handler said.

Earlier that day, Handler reported that the architect from Mosaic Associates and the contractors from The Palombo Group visited the Stissing Mountain Junior/Senior High School auditorium to do a final check list. The district believes there are items on a punch list that the district’s general contractor needs to fix, though the general contractor has claimed he’s not responsible. After the district reviewed and revised the punch list and prioritized it, Handler said the architect is going to contact the general contractor to inform him that they’re going to get an estimate from another contractor to fix the items unless he fixes them himself. Furthermore, the architect said that whatever the district pays the other contractor will be deducted from the money they owe the original contractor, and then send him a check reflecting the deduction. 

Delivering some good news, Handler said the district heard this week from Bus Patrol, the company Dutchess County has hired to install cameras on school buses, and that Pine Plains was the first to send in the agreement to install cameras. He added that Bus Patrol is going to install six cameras on every school bus at no cost to the district. The STOP arm camera will send images of motorists unlawfully passing school buses directly to Dutchess County and the county will write a violation. 

The rest of the images captured by the cameras would be on a web-based situation. In addition to the interior cameras, exterior cameras would be monitoring traffic around the school buses.

While on the subject of transportation, Handler said he’d like to entertain the idea of looking for a response vehicle for the Transportation Department. He would like to get something reasonable, a four-wheel drive vehicle for the bus garage that Transportation Supervisor Lauren Ross could use to go out and monitor the roads if there was a severe weather situation.

After giving an update on its tax collection, Handler asked for a motion to revise the BOE meeting calendar to move the school building tours to the spring so the BOE would be able to hold the tours in-person. The BOE approved the revision to the calendar.