Sewanhaka’s board has five new young members – and a plethora of new district-wide plans.
Superintendent Regina Agrusa started off the district’s August board meeting by introducing Evengeline Moonsammy, Jasmine Chen, Christopher Sebber, Adam Abdullah, and Kyara Ozil as the district’s first ex officio board members during the Tuesday night meeting.
“The Board of Education values the voices of our students and recognizes the important role that student voice plays in ensuring meaningful and respectful dialogue,” Agrusa said.
Each member represents one of the district’s five high schools. All are currently going through leadership and civic training to learn the ropes of school board meetings and how to best advocate for themselves and their classmates when decisions are being made in board meetings.
After their official welcome, the board unanimously passed a district-wide cell phone ban, a policy that has been up for community review for the past few months. It comes in response to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s statewide school cell phone ban included in the state budget.
“This policy prohibits the use of personal internet-enabled devices, including smartphones, tablets, and smart watches during the school day,” Agrusa said. The goal is for the ban to create a distraction-free environment for learning.
The policy states that all personal electronic devices must be left at home or silenced and kept in the student’s locker for the duration of the school day. Two exceptions to the policy include when a device is necessary for a student’s health or IEP plan and if a student is routinely responsible for the care of a family member.
If students are caught with a device, it will be taken from them and held in the school office.
Later on, the board also welcomed Lamar Lee of the Football Leadership Institute to provide a presentation on a social, emotional and psychological training program he’s been providing to the district’s football athletes.
The program focuses on building team culture, the responsibilities of being a student athlete, careful social media usage, tips on brand-building as an athlete looking to be recruited by a college, and the importance of supporting teammates on and off the field.
Separate from the HEART Committee, an internal district solution to repeated racist incidents from Bellemore-Merrick students against Elmont students during sporting games, Lee said his program encouraged student athletes to participate in the committee.
During the public comment period, community members asked that game schedules and information be posted more prominently on the district website and social media so they could come out and support student-athletes and so those athletes could share information about their games with the school community more easily.
Agrusa said the district’s boys’ and girls’ basketball teams, as well as cheerleading teams, are planning to participate in a similar program.
Turning their attention to safety, the board held a public hearing on the district’s safety plan, an annual plan developed in conjunction with local police departments and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to ensure student safety throughout the year.
“We look at what are the best practices for lockdown drills, for fire drills and put these things in place,” said Scott Greene, administrative assistant to the superintendent who supports the development of the safety plan.
The most significant alteration between this year’s plan and last year’s is the increased emphasis on AEDs after the July passage of Desha’s Law, a state law that requires districts to implement cardiac emergency response plans and ensure school personnel are trained on using an AED.
“All the coaches in our district are able to use an AED. That’s not enough,” Greene said. “Over the next couple of months, we’re going to partner with our athletic director and the American Red Cross, and we’re going to get more people trained within our district. Our entire security staff is going to be trained on AED and all of our administrators, including principals and assistant principals.”
Greene said the district will also be looking for faculty volunteers to be trained on AEDs and may extend the training to students as well.
“The more people that are involved, the more people that can use these machines, the more lives we can save in an emergency situation,” Greene said.
After the board concluded its business, multiple parents took to the microphone to ask for changes to the district’s bus routes, which, to their surprise, don’t include their children this year.
“I’m a parent of a 12-year-old young girl. She’s about 4’8, 4’9, and about 60 pounds,” said the parent of a new Floral Park Memorial High School Student. “And, she’s going to be walking 1.6 miles to school…crossing Jericho Turnpike, because we were told the bus is not for us.”
He said the lack of busing was causing his family and daughter stress and requested that the board review and possibly revise the district’s bus routes.
Agrusa said the board would discuss the issue.
The Sewanhaka Board of Education will meet again on Sept. 30.
