Committee Presents Long-Term Capital Improvement Plan at Sag Harbor Board of Education Meeting

School Business Administrator Jennifer Buscemi and representatives from the firm H2M presented the Educational and Facilities Planning Committee’s Long Range Capital Plan at the Sag Harbor School Board meeting on Monday night.

The plan was the result of 19 meetings over the last two years for the committee, which includes district parents, residents, board members, teachers and administrators.

At those meetings, the committee discussed building condition survey reports, the district’s plans to upgrade the HVAC systems in several buildings, a high school gym renovation and possible future addition of a wet lab to enhance the science programs, and the use of repair reserve funds to address the gym floors in the high school and middle school and necessary repairs to the walls, ceilings, hallways and stairwells in the elementary school.

Coming up with this type of long-range plan is necessitated by the state for school districts and is required to be updated annually.

Buscemi explained that the current long-range plan, which extends from 2025 through 2029, includes “the maintenance and repair of our current facilities based on existing conditions and instructional programs and addressing any immediate health and safety projects,” but does not include security upgrades, the construction of the wet lab, high school gym renovations, athletic field improvements, the transition to zero-emission buses, and a few other key issues the district has said it will need to address, which can be added in the future, Buscemi said.

Money already set aside in several reserve funds will help pay for some of the necessary capital improvements in the long range plan, and the district could also put together a future bond project, which would require voter approval, for some of the aspects of the plan.

In the first year of the long-term plan, the district will complete roughly $5.6 million worth of necessary improvements, and may pursue a bond for a solar energy project at some point in the future.

A total of $12 million of work will be carried out over the next five years.

Details of the plan are available on the school district website.

The board will vote on approval of the plan at its next board meeting, set for July 15.

Class Rank To Be Discussed

Also at the July 15 meeting, the board will bring up for discussion the topic of class rank. The district has been considering eliminating class rank. If it does, it would be following a larger nationwide trend of eliminating the practice.

There are pros and cons to the practice, and Pierson valedictorian Isabelle Caplin spoke at the start of Monday night’s meeting in defense of class rank. Superintendent Jeff Nichols said at a meeting in May that the district’s Shared Decision Making Committee chose both class rank and dress code as areas of focus at the start of the year.

Class rank was a big issue more than 10 years ago, and whether to eliminate the system of ranking each individual in the class by academic performance was debated by the committee at that time. After weighing the pros and cons, the committee recommended staying with the class rank system because, at that time, many colleges and universities asked for that information as part of their application processes.

At the time, that consideration took precedence over the main objection to the class ranking system, which, as Nichols stated, “can create an overly competitive environment where kids are focused on where they stack up against their peers and not on learning.”

Many areas schools still have class rank, but some don’t, most notably Southampton, which eliminated the process several years ago.