The Class of 2011 - Union Free School District of the Tarrytowns

Presenting
The Class of 2011
The Sleepy Hollow High School
Class of 2011 celebrated graduation
on Thursday, June 23, with words
of advice from district educators and
classmates, then joyfully tossed their
mortarboards into the air. Wearing
bright maroon and white graduation
gowns, the 195 SHHS seniors listened
as Principal Carol Conklin reminded
them that “there really is so much to
celebrate.”
“We believe in you. We have faith in
you,” she said. “Remember that.”
Superintendent of Schools Dr. Howard
Smith noted that today’s students live
in an exciting period, known for its
blazing fast and often truncated ways to
communicate, and he used Twitter, the
140-character social networking site, as
an example.
Even with those exciting tools, he said,
“don’t lose your capacity to express
yourself and don't take shortcuts in life.”
Students also heard from Salutatorian
Adam Caspari and Valedictorian Carl
Robinson, who celebrated his 19th
birthday on graduation day.
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UFSD of the Tarrytowns
200 North Broadway
Sleepy Hollow, NY 10591
www.tufsd.org
School News-Cable Channel 77
Board of Education
Mimi Godwin, President
Paul Rode, Vice President
Sheila J. Conklin
Craig Laub
Vincent Nadile
B. Joseph Lillis
Katharine M. Swibold
Superintendent of Schools
Dr. Howard W. Smith
(914) 631-9404
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Tarrytown/Sleepy Hollow, NY
10591
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CARRIER PRESORT
Evelyn McCormack, Editor
Maria Ilardi, Art Director
The Public Schools of the Tarrytowns do not discriminate on the basis of sex, marital status, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, citizenship, age or disability or any other protected classification in its
employment, admissions practices, vocational opportunities or access to and treatment in programs or activities, in accordance with Title IX, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and Title VII and the
Americans with Disabilities Act. Inquiries concerning application of these regulations may be made to the Assistant Superintendent of the UFSD of the Tarrytowns, 200 North Broadway, Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. 10591.
Spring Brings Chicks to
the Classrooms at Morse
It was spring at the Winfield L. Morse
Elementary School, and this year, that
meant one thing.
Chicks were hatching.
In the nine first-grade classrooms at
Morse, students and teachers watched
carefully over the spring as dozens of eggs,
being kept warm in special incubators,
slowly began to wobble, crack and —
voila! — produce yellow, downy chicks.
It was all part of a multidisciplinary learning
opportunity, said Lisa Kedem, reading
specialist at Morse. “We incorporated
science, English language arts, and other
skills.,” said Ms. Kedem. “Our students
learned about the hatching process, read
books on the topic, wrote poetry about
the chicks, learned new vocabulary
words, used their mathematical skills, and
studied the growth
cycle.”
Public Schools of the Tarrytowns
Each classroom was equipped with its
own incubator, containing small lamps
that kept the eggs warm. The eggs were
obtained from the 4-H Youth and Family
Development Program in Valhalla.
And as the chicks hatched, all kinds of
shelters were constructed to protect them
— everything from simple shoeboxes to
an elaborate “chick condo” in Pat Buckley
and Liz Cantillana’s classroom.
A highlight of the learning process was
“candling” the eggs, said Ms. Kedem, in
which a light is held up to the eggshells,
making it possible to see inside and check
on the growth and development of the
embryos.
“We also had to teach the students that
the chicks are not pets,” said Ms. Kedem,
and not to get too attached.” Once the
chicks were big enough, they
were taken to Stone Barns in
Pocantico Hills.
In fact, Stone Barns accepts
approximately 1,200 of chicks
hatched in classrooms. Teachers
from Westchester, Rockland,
Connecticut and New York City
bring boxes of chicks to the farm,
often accompanied by brightly
colored notes of farewell from their
knowledgeable student hatchers.
Mosaic Peace Mural
continued from page 5
Bronze Star veteran, spoke to her students in
October 2010 about his experiences serving in
World War II.
Galella’s moving presentation inspired students
to create the peace mural. Ms. Harrison had
already completed a restoration of a large World
War II Memorial Wall that had fallen into disrepair
at the Beekman Avenue firehouse in Sleepy
Hollow, and the peace mural was a project that
the students themselves could tackle.
The mural was unveiled at a ceremony at the
Sleepy Hollow High School auditorium, attended
by students, school officials, government
officials and veterans. An inscription on the
mural is the quote from Mother Theresa.
At the ceremony, Sleepy Hollow Mayor Ken
Wray issued a proclamation dedicating June 16 as
a day to honor Sleepy Hollow Middle School art
students, and Mayor Drew Fixell of Tarrytown
dedicated a certificate of merit to the students
for their work. The students also received
recognition from representatives of Congresswoman
Nita Lowey and state Assemblyman Tom
Abinanti.
The 90-year-old Mr. Galella, who also attended
the ceremony, said that the mural “means so
much to me and so many veterans.”
Tarrytowns schools Superintendent Dr. Howard
Smith called the effort by Ms. Harrison and her
students “a story about service, handed down
from the Greatest Generation to the youngest
generation."
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Public Schools of the Tarrytowns
POSTAL CUSTOMER
Tarrytown/Sleepy Hollow, NY
Table of Contents Message from the 10591 Superintendent
Summer
Graduation............................ 3
iPads Help Students
Produce Poetry,
Presentations
and Videos............................ 4
SHHS Assistant
Principal to
Retire After 20 Years.............. 4
How Does Your
Middle School
Garden Grow?...................... 5
The Sustainability Challenge
One of the many side effects of
the economic downturn is that
it has caused us to ask some fundamental
questions about what
we value in our model of public
education. In true American
fashion, the model began with
an audacious and relatively unprecedented
notion of providing a free education to
all children. However, while the idea was ambitious,
the objectives and the resources devoted to achieving
them at the outset were proportional to the times
and therefore relatively modest. Over time, again
in true American fashion, we made it bigger and
better by extending it through 12th grade, creating
specialty areas of instruction, and generally expanding
its mission. Today, the goal according to our state
education commissioner is essentially for all students
to graduate ready for success in college. Needless to
say, this requires the devotion of more sophisticated
and extensive resources than were envisioned in the
2011
CARRIER PRESORT
context of the original 8th grade level functional
literacy goal of public education.
As our model of education has grown, so has the
notion of what it means to be a teacher or a school
administrator. In order to develop the profession
as a career that would attract talented, well trained
teachers in sufficient numbers to meet the growing
demands for their services, the standard of living that
could be attained by career teachers had to improve.
Today, education has arguably emerged as a middle
class profession in contrast to its original status, and
it needs to stay that way. It is not just a coincidence
that education in countries with some of the highest
achieving students is a respected and reasonably well
compensated profession.
So now we have a public education model that is
more far reaching than was ever imagined at its
inception and it is being delivered by more and better
compensated educators than the original concept
was intended to support. All of this was relatively
continued on page 2
Students Honor
Veterans with Mosaic
Peace Mural.......................... 5
Spring Brings Chicks
to the Classrooms
at Morse............................... 6
Message from the Board President
The Year in Review
This was a challenging year from a fiscal perspective, but
thanks to a collaborative effort on the part of the staff,
administration, and community, it was also a successful
one. We began the year with a seamless transition from
four elementary school buildings to three buildings. As
predicted, the new grades 3-5 and grades 1-2 arrangements
represent ideal combinations from both a developmental
and a curriculum/ instruction perspective. The
larger John Paulding School enabled us to combine our
pre-kindergarten and kindergarten programs under one
roof and the building was made handicapped accessible.
The Morse School was successfully adapted for use by
grades 1 and 2 through installation of child-sized lockers,
modifications of restrooms, and significant improvements
in terms of the playground, parking, and traffic
flow.
An independent study of our facilities by an engineering
firm, in accordance with a state requirement that such
studies be conducted every five
years, confirmed that our facilities
are in great shape. Only minor
ongoing maintenance issues need
to be attended to. In addition, we
are moving forward with an energy
management project that will be
funded completely by associated
savings in energy costs.
We also began the year with a much more efficient transportation
program that allowed us to reduce the number
of school buses we need to put on the road by operating
three different bus runs each morning and afternoon
instead of two for our elementary students. Bus travel
time remained comparable to what it has been in previous
years. Monitors remained in our pre-K/Kindergarten
buses but were replaced by cameras in our other buses,
continued on page 2
3 Public Schools of the Tarrytowns • Bridges

Message from the Superintendent
The Sustainability Challenge continued from page 1
sustainable as long as our economy was
growing along with the model and the resources
it required. However, we are now
faced with a prolonged prospect of a sluggish
economy characterized by a great deal
of ongoing uncertainty on the part of the
general population regarding the stability
of their jobs, salaries and benefits and the
value of what is typically their greatest
asset … their home. Neither the economy
nor home values are expected to grow at a
rate comparable to the ongoing mandate
and contract driven rate of growth in the
cost of public education for some time
to come. This has raised understandable
questions about whether the scale of the
model we have built has become disproportional
to our capacity to support it.
Our discussions with members of the community
this year revealed a general level
of support for the programs and services
the school district currently provides. We
were not confronted with demands to
cut costs by increasing class sizes, reducing
high school electives, or eliminating
discretionary programs involving the arts
or sports. Not surprisingly, a general desire
was expressed to achieve savings through
cutbacks in costs associated with noninstructional
and administrative personnel
that are perceived to be less directly related
to the delivery of programs and services
to students. In fact, this is where most of
our savings were achieved … to the point
where future opportunities for additional
savings in these areas have been greatly
diminished.
If people generally want what our model
of public education offers, but their capacity
to support it is lagging behind the increasing
costs associated with sustaining it,
the challenge of sustainability must be met
through some form of restructuring. This
is not much different from the challenge a
company faces if the revenue generated by
people buying its products does not keep
pace with the increased cost of production.
Simply imposing a cap on revenue,
as the governor has suggested via his proposed
2% property tax cap, will not solve
the problems driving our increased costs.
We will need to take a creative, thoughtful
approach in examining how we deploy our
resources and how we balance the continuing
need for a profession that can sustain
its members against the need for proportionality
relative to prevailing economic
circumstances. We have re-envisioned our
mission. Now we have to re-envision how
we accomplish it.
Howard W. Smith, Ph.D.
Superintendent of Schools
Message from the Board President
The Year in Review continued from page 1
without any measurable increase in the frequency of bus behavior
problems.
Class sizes were a little larger at some grade levels, but the school
day for our students continued to be filled with a rich mix of opportunities.
We continued to be recognized nationally for the high
graduation rate we experience in spite of the fact that typically 1
out of every 2 seniors do not begin their educational careers in our
district and many enter our schools from other countries, speaking
a language other than English. Once again our information
indicates that 96% of our graduating seniors have been accepted
for admission to a college or university, including some of the most
competitive institutions of higher learning in the country.
Teachers have continued to refine their skills as we raise our
expectations regarding student achievement. They have had access
to new tools in the form of customized training and increasingly
sophisticated instructional programs delivered by the latest technology.
All of our elementary classrooms are now equipped with
iPads and students in each of our buildings are using iPods as well.
More high school students are taking advanced placement courses
than ever before. Our students compete in the Math Olympiad
and our high school students have completed research projects that
have been recognized at the regional and national levels. We have
an award winning digital media program. Our dramatic arts program
has become more ambitious in recent years, due to expanded
offerings at the elementary level (including Shakespeare) and the
opportunities afforded to middle and high school students by our
new auditorium. Increasing numbers of students are participating
and excelling in the state music association competition and in our
athletics and other extra-curricular programs. Even as the cost per
athlete has dropped, the number of winning seasons has risen and
we have athletes qualifying to compete at the state level. We have a
number of exciting partnerships with outside organizations such as
the Jacob Burns media arts program, Stone Barns, Philipse Manor
Restoration site, Pace University, IBM, BASF, the YMCA, and
other organizations.
Our character education program has been strengthened, with
a more concentrated focus on an anti-bullying program. Our
students have been actively engaged in community service projects
and in fund raising for worthy causes. They have also participated
in some exciting intergenerational projects with senior citizens.
They tend increasingly elaborate gardens and have become more
aware of their responsibilities as future stewards of our environment.
Global awareness has also increased as young students interact
with students elsewhere in the world virtually and high school
students continue to travel to other continents.
Thanks to contributions from our employee unions and the
community’s support for next year’s budget, we can look forward
to another exciting year of opportunities for our students without
the program cutbacks we feared earlier in our budget development
process. It is a great time to be a student in the Public Schools of
the Tarrytowns!
Mimi Godwin
President, Board of Education
2 Public Schools of the Tarrytowns

iPads Help Students Produce Poetry, Presentations
and Videos
The Tarrytowns schools have joined an
increasing number of districts around the
country now taking advantage of the iPad to
improve learning, with the use of hundreds
of learning applications and an extremely
mobile device.
The ubiquitous touch-screen tablets,
introduced by Apple in January 2010, have
reached classrooms at Sleepy Hollow High
School and Tarrytown’s elementary schools,
each using them in different ways.
At the Winfield Morse Elementary School
recently, second-grade students unveiled
their work – almost all of it created using
iPads and associated software – at a public
Poetry Café event held for their parents, who marveled
at the technology.
After immersing themselves in a two-month study
of poetry, each classroom at Morse published poetry
anthologies using Keynote, a presentation application
available on the iPad. The Keynote presentations
assembled by each class were then exported into
iMovie, and then into iTunes, so that each of the nine
second-grade classes could share their presentations
with one another and their parents could receive
links to each iBook.
SHHS Assistant Principal to Retire After 20 Years
Alan Alterbaum, the
Sleepy Hollow High
School assistant principal
who is retiring at
the end of the summer,
has had an impact on
legions of students and
parents over the years.
And that includes the
time he once surprised
a former student during his bachelor party weekend
in Las Vegas.
“His friends asked me to surprise him, so while he
was playing roulette in a casino, I tapped him on the
shoulder and said, ‘I understand you boys need a
chaperone’,” said Mr. Alterbaum. “He was shocked.”
Mr. Alterbaum served SHHS for 20 years, a career in
which he developed a firm but understanding relationship
with students and their parents, and worked
in tandem for 18 of those years with Principal Carol
Conklin. It is the longest such school administrative
partnership in Westchester County.
As a team, said Mr. Alterbaum, he and Mrs. Conklin
were “the school Mom and Dad to our students. We
In Anne Bakala’s classroom, students spent April and
May studying poetry, and the types of poems they
might want to tackle. They learned terms like alliteration,
similes, metaphors, and diamonte poems. That
was the hard part.
For the students, using the iPads and the software
needed to “produce” their poems was a cinch. Other
apps students used during the poetry initiative were
Apple’s dictionary application and thesaurus application.
“The students taught the teachers how to use the
technology,” said Jean O’Brien, the District’s Technology
Integration Specialist. “It’s just second nature
to them.”
And it might help learning. According to eSchool-
News, hundreds of middle school students in San
Joaquin Valley, Calif., and across the state—each
never had to rehearse what we were doing. We just
knew each other that well.”
At the same time, he said, the pair was always “able to
be honest with each other.”
They are especially proud of a change they made in
the way students are disciplined at the high school.
Instead of automatically placing students in detention
or in-school suspension, they developed student
improvement plans and changed the school’s disciplinary
approach from punitive to encouraging.
Among other initiatives, SHHS replaced detention
monitors with teaching assistants to help struggling
students. The program gained recognition from the
U.S. Department of Education in their “What Works
in Schools” initiative.
Mr. Alterbaum is also proud of SHHS’s reputation as
a school of diversity and tolerance.
“This school is a marvelous piece of the world,” he
said. “Our students learn so much about tolerance
because they naturally mix with each other and appreciate
each other’s cultural backgrounds. It’s great
exposure and prepares them for the diversity they
with a school-issued iPad—are using curriculum
apps for their classwork and homework.
Educators there say students who use the
touch-screen devices for class appear to
be more engaged in their studies, and test
scores of iPad-using students are climbing.
In Tanya Richardson’s class at Morse, students
not only assembled books of poetry,
but published memoirs they wrote in
iBooks, the application that allows you
to download books and save them in a
visual “library” for reading at any time.
Mrs. Richardson’s iBook library was then
made available to parents.
Her students love using the iPads, said Mrs. Richardson.
“The iPad and the applications on it immediately
engage our students. We have ESL students in
our classroom as well, and I see everyone wanting to
read on the iPad.”
The tablets also take up very little space, she noted.
The Tarrytown iPad initiative is just the beginning,
said Ms. O’Brien. “We’re just getting started. There
are so many different iPad applications out there that
it will take us some time to figure out what will work
in our classrooms. And new apps are added every day.”
To watch the poetry videos created Morse secondgraders,
visit the District website.
will likely experience both in college and the real
world.”
He recalled a concert held at SHHS by a group of
disabled adults during the 2009-10 school year.
“Instead of being uncomfortable, our students were
so positive. They even got a conga line going. There’s
a general feeling of caring here.”
Mr. Alterbaum began his career in Buffalo, where
he taught high school math. He and his wife, Gerry,
then moved to Long Island for a number of years
before moving to Yorktown when he was offered
the job in Tarrytown. The couple has a 31-year-old
daughter and a 29-year-old son, who will be married
in October.
What will he do in retirement? Mr. Alterbaum, who
officially leaves at the end of August, said he’s leaving
his plans open. “I want to know what it feels like to
do nothing for a while,” he said.
For now, he wants to learn how to cook, will take a
cruise with his wife, and will prepare for his son’s
wedding. The couple owns a house in the Adirondacks,
and Mr. Alterbaum, an avid skier, has already
purchased his season lift ticket for Whiteface
Mountain.
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How Does Your Middle School Garden Grow?
Quite well, if you’re Sleepy Hollow Middle
School, where students have been tending to an
herb garden, a “kitchen” garden that can provide
salads and vegetables, and even a certified butterfly
garden with great success.
The gardens, all located behind the Middle
School building, spent the spring sprouting
tomatoes, lettuces, arugula, peppers, peas, basil,
and other vegetables and herbs. In the fall,
pumpkins will be growing in the same spot.
It’s all part of an overall effort by the endlessly
active Environmental Action Club, which this
year alone has created the gardens, constructed
a NASA weather station, built bird feeders and
birdhouses, raised funds for the World Wildlife
Funding, turned off their lights for Earth Hour,
and learned about endangered tigers.
“The students are inspiring us, and care about
saving the environment,” said co-advisor Michael
Garguilo. “They introduce their own ideas for
projects and we often follow their lead.”
The butterfly garden, designed specifically to
attract butterflies with plants that include milkweed,
has been certified by the North American
Butterfly Association, which means that it provides
the resources necessary to help increase the
world’s population of butterflies. At the Middle
School garden, two monarch butterflies visit on
a regular basis.
Even though gardening returns students to
nature, they’re also assisted by some cool
modern-day gadgets. The kitchen garden, with
its pristine rows of vegetable plants, is watered by
an automatic watering system. The garden is also
“watched over” by a series of time-lapse video
cameras, purchased with a grant from the Foundation
for the Public Schools of the Tarrytowns.
Each green camera houses a memory card, which
can later be used on a computer to watch how
the garden has grown over time. These time-lapse
videos, said Mr. Garguilo, can be studied by students
in next year’s science courses and used in
a variety of interdisciplinary projects. Also with
funds from the Foundation, the school was able
to purchase tools and a shed, which have helped
students tend their gardens on a weekly basis.
The entire kitchen garden has been certified by
the National Wildlife Organization as a wildlife
habitat as well.
The NASA weather station, which was acquired
through a grant from the Candreva Environmental
Foundation, sits on the school roof
and permits NASA weather satellites to track
weather conditions in the region and compare
real-time weather with forecasts.
The work of the Environmental Action Club
culminated in the spring, when the students held
Green Week, an entire week devoted school-wide
to environmental awareness. The week started
with Animal Day, in which students were encouraged
to dress as their favorite animal and the
cafeteria distributed animal cookies. On Dark
Day, teachers used as little electricity as possible
to conserve energy. And to end the week,
students wore black and orange
to commemorate Save the Tigers
Day and attended an assembly to
raise awareness about “preserving
our resources and precious life
on the planet,” said Mr. Garguilo.
In addition to Mr. Garguilo, the
school’s environmental initiatives
have been spearheaded by teacher
and co-advisor Angel Linteau,
Camilla Calimandrei, Pamela
Pinto-Sessions, Principal Elizabeth
Lopez, and parent volunteers Elizabeth Kaplan
and Jan Maltby. Even Mr. Garguilo’s wife, Kristin
Quell-Garguilo, provided assistance by making
props.
To visit the EAC website and learn more about
what you can do to save the environment, go to
https://sites.google.com/site/garguiloscience/
EnvironmentalActionClub.
Students Honor Veterans with Mosaic Peace Mural
Mother Theresa once said, “Piece by piece,
a smile is the beginning of peace.”
And that was the theme that embodied a
year-long project by Sleepy Hollow Middle
School students that was unveiled on June
16 – an intricate mural made of thousands of
pieces of cut paper, fashioned into a depiction
of doves, each carrying people of many
nations, religions and races.
SHMS art teacher Andrea Harrison, who
spearheaded the project created by her art
students, said she was moved to create the
mural in honor of country’s veterans after
Armando “Chick” Galella, a well-known
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Public Schools of the Tarrytowns
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