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July 1, 2024
Dear Friends of the New Paltz Central School District,
The 2023-2024 school year has come to an end. The 2024-2025 school year officially begins today. Now seems like a perfect time to update you on the end of the year and share with you a few plans for the future.
Graduation
On Wednesday night, we officially recognized the achievements of the class of 2024.
Our 191 graduates threw their caps in the air in the SUNY New Paltz gym in front of a standing room only crowd. Click here if you want to Watch the graduation.
We appreciate the efforts of class advisors Joe Dolan and Bonnie Masseo, as well as those of secretaries, Principals, facilities/maintenance workers, counselors, and the technology department in making this ceremony possible. Thank you also to SUNY New Paltz for hosting us when the weather forecast made it too risky to hold our graduation on the athletic field.
We offer our congratulations to our graduates and their families on a job well done and we wish you continued success in the future.
Moving Up
The class of 2024 will not be the only students experiencing change next year. Our 8th grade students who will be moving to high school were recognized on Tuesday at a moving up ceremony at SUNY New Paltz.
The 5th grade students who will be moving up to middle school next year were recognized at a ceremony in the High School Auditorium on Monday.
Our Duzine 2nd graders will be moving up to Lenape next year. They were recognized with a special clap-out by their teachers and school mates.
You can see additional pictures and videos of all of these moving up events by checking out our school facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/NewPaltzCentralSchoolDistrict
Thanks to outside organizations
It takes a village to raise great kids and to offer all of the opportunities available to our students. A tremendous amount of credit goes to our outstanding faculty and staff members in our district. However, there are many other groups that contribute to our success. So, at the risk of leaving someone out, I will offer a few thank yous:
PTA - We have very active members in our Duzine-Lenape PTA, Middle School PTA, and High School PTA. They make a lot of things happen and their efforts pay for a lot of field trips. Thank you to the PTA for all you do.
As you can imagine, our PTA groups are always looking for new members. If you are interested in learning more about what the PTA does and how you can join, please follow these links:
Rotary Club - The New Paltz Rotary Club does many things for our students including offering them scholarships and support with the High School Interact Club (the student version of the Rotary Club). Perhaps their most significant contribution however is their sponsorship of the school’s BackPack program. Through the efforts of the Rotary Club, students in need get a backpack full of essential food items to take home each weekend to supplement family meals..
The Rotary holds many fundraising events in order to support the Backpack program. Partnering with the Regional Food Bank of the Hudson Valley, the following are their Backpack program numbers for this past year at the New Paltz Central School District:
- Total bags distributed: 2750
- Average weekly enrollment: 74
- Total Pounds of food distributed: 26,050
- Equivalent meals distributed: 21,708
- Meals distributed per child throughout the year: 292
- Cost per meal: $0.97
- Snacks provided to social workers for children in the program who get hungry during the school day
- 50 Rotarians volunteer their time to unload food, place food on shelves, and pack bags weekly
NP Rotary would like to thank Lightning Express for their pick up and delivery of the food from Dutchess Community College, NPCSD Transportation Department for helping to deliver the bags, and C2G and Farmer’s Insurance for allowing them to use a room to store the food and pack the bags.
New Paltz Youth Program - The youth program (who also runs the very popular Youth Center) has done a great job bringing back the popular CAFE program in the high school. The CAFE program gives HS students a place to go during lunch if they don’t want to go to the cafeteria. On days when the program is running, students can go to the cozy corner in the library to hang out, play games, or just talk with friends as well as members of the New Paltz Youth Program. On nice weather days, students can also go outside with the Program representatives and play games or hang out with friends. These are great alternatives for students who are not comfortable being in the cafeteria.
New Paltz Central School District Foundation for Student Enhancement - The Foundation is made up of community volunteers who raise money and then donate the money to teachers or students in our district who have a particular innovative educational project that needs funding. This past school year they funded the following projects:
- Mr. Gill - Social Studies Teacher, $2000 to fund guest speaker Bryan Collier
- Ms. Oppenheimer and Ms. Bulson, $900 to fund the production of an educational 4th grade play about Colonial America
- Ms. Conrad, Mr. Engle, and Ms. Sharpe, $3000 to create a MS Book Room
- Randa Abdelrahman and the HS Math Department,: $588 for a subscription to Screencastify
- Mr. Esposito, science teacher: $850 for supplies to maintain the HS Courtyard
- Ms. Crowder, 4th Grade Teacher, $712 for creative environmental supports for Lenape
I am sure I missed some outstanding outside groups who have helped, and for that I apologize. Thanks to all who have been there for our students.
Excessive Heat and the Proposed Capital Project
The week before last, we had some pretty hot days at school. Many parents expressed concerns about how hot their children were in the classrooms. While some classrooms in the district have portable air conditioners and some have central air, many classrooms and most large group spaces such as auditoriums, cafeterias, kitchens and gymnasiums do not have air conditioning.
Rest assured, that despite the fact that some of the classrooms were way too hot, cooler places were made available to all students. In fact, we were happy to have students come to the District Office conference room and the Superintendent’s office to cool off whenever they wanted.
The district is aware that the classrooms were hot. We did a study of the elementary and middle schools to see which rooms tended to be the hottest and what time of day they were the hottest. We will use this and other information as we try to formulate a plan to prepare for a potentially increasing number of extreme heat days in the future. It seems clear that a comprehensive plan that addresses the problem of hot classrooms in a fair, logical, environmentally friendly, and equitable way would be most appropriate.
As you are probably aware, our district voters recently approved a $2,000,000 capital project, paid for with existing savings, to repair elevators and fire alarm systems. The district facility committee and school board are also discussing the possibility of bringing a larger capital project to the voters in the late fall. This capital project will likely have between 1 and 3 options. Option 1, which would need to be passed in order for options 2 or 3 to pass, would address high priority items such as repairing roofs, windows, and doors. Options 2 would likely contain mostly sports facilities upgrades such as new sports fields and courts. A possible option 3, which would be dependent on the passing of option 1 but not necessarily on option 2, might include an aquatics center.
Please realize that, other than the $2,000,000 capital project already approved, nothing else is definite. The district facilities committee, on behalf of the school board, is currently looking at price quotes and are trying to refine the list of options before they bring a proposal to the school board. The school board has final say on all capital project decisions.
It is worth mentioning that there is currently nothing in any of the capital project plans for air conditioning, other than central air for the traditionally hot Lenape Library. However, after our latest stretch of very hot days and the potential for more hot days, it seems that a discussion on how to best address the idea of providing cool classrooms is highly appropriate.
We are currently working with our school architects to generate price quotes for adding some type of air conditioning to particular areas in the school district. We look forward to providing this information to the facilities committee and the school board so they can make decisions about what can and should be funded by a capital project.
Obviously, any capital project we bring to the voters needs to be well thought out and financially responsible. It is important to know that adding significant air conditioning to the capital project would probably mean the elimination of some of the other items currently being considered in a capital project.
Continuing Education Program
We continue to look for community members who are interested in offering a program at our new community continuing education program slated to start in September. The goal of the program is to allow community members to use district facilities to bring educational and wellness options to students and community members during after school or evening events.
If you would like to learn more about this program, please contact me. If you would like to propose an offering, please follow this link.
The goal is to receive all proposals by late July. We will then create a catalog of offerings in early August and take registrations for participants in late August. The program will run from September through November.
District Goals and Plans for 2024-2025
Last fall, the school board used community input to generate goals for the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 school years. These goals can be found by clicking on this link. While these goals remain our priority, this summer we will be working on other items that are also very important.
School Safety - We have not lost our focus on school safety and we continue to work to implement the safety procedures that we explained back on April 24th. We have already made good progress on some of these items and we hope to address the rest over the summer.
Demolition of the Old District Office - The board approved the demolition of the old district office last year. We applied for permission from the state to remove the building but we have yet to receive that permission. We expect to get this approval any day. We are set to go with the demolition which is expected to take 4-6 weeks. If we get permission in the next 2 or 3 weeks, we will immediately begin with the demolition. However, if we don’t have approval by mid to late July, we will postpone the entire project for another school year since we can’t risk having construction going on in our middle school parking lot when school starts in September.
Capital Project - We will start working on the $2,000,000 replacement of elevators and fire alarm systems as soon as we get state approval, which will not happen anytime soon. We also hope to make progress this summer in defining what a larger capital project (as described earlier) should contain so we can hopefully bring a plan to the voters for a referendum in December.
Literacy - We continue to embrace the Science of Reading as a district. This past year we began using UFLI in Duzine classrooms to provide consistent, explicit phonics instruction and next year we will adopt Wonders as a curriculum for our literacy instruction in Lenape. Duzine teachers are updating the Integrated Units to address all other components of literacy instruction, including comprehension and writing. Much work will be done this summer by teachers and administrators to prepare for this change.
Fiscal Accountability - Our last two budget cycles have been very difficult. The necessary reductions and downsizing we have done over the past two years have put us in a much better place financially. However, our school population continues to decline. We just graduated 191 students and our incoming kindergarten class is expected to be a little less than 100 students. This should put our entire district student enrollment down below 1700 students. We must make every effort to be frugal with our money and to respond to student reductions while making sure we keep all programs in place. The school board has requested that we create a 5 year financial plan to better anticipate and prepare for budget shortfalls in the future. We plan to start this process this summer.
This is only a partial list of all that will be going on this summer. I will keep you updated on our projects and on our progress.
I wish you all a great summer. I look forward to any questions or comments that you might have. Stay tuned for future updates as the summer progresses.
Regards,
Stephen Gratto - Superintendent
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