Dear Pine Bush staff and parents,

I have two messages for you tonight: the first is about the extension to our school elections and the second is about the process established for students to pick up their personal belongings and return school property.

Today, the governor issued a new executive order modifying the due date for ballots in the school election originally scheduled for tomorrow, June 9.  Now, we can accept personally delivered ballots if they are in the required envelopes, and if they are dropped off here at District Office up until 5 p.m. tomorrow. However, we will accept any ballots that arrive by mail all the way up until 5 p.m. next Tuesday, June 16. That effectively makes next Tuesday the official day of the election. The executive order also directs that we cannot begin counting ballots until after 5 p.m. on June 16.  Since the task of counting ballots will require a large team of election inspectors, Pine Bush will begin counting ballots on Wednesday, June 17, and we will announce the results when we are finished. There will be a live video feed of the ballot counting posted to our website, since no one can come personally to watch.

As a reminder, I posted a video on our website showing you how to complete your absentee ballot, in case you’ve never done that before. The video is about 8 minutes and it is now the second item at the very top of our homepage in the yellow banner.

Second, I want parents to understand how we have arranged to return personal items to our students. A team, led by our head of security, Mr. Alex Tremper, gathered items from desks and/or lockers and placed the items for each student in a separate plastic bag, tagged with the student’s name. In some instances, teachers were also able to add things to these bags before they were tied up. The plan is for parents, hopefully with their children (or students, if they are in HS and able to drive) to come to the schools at designated times. Once you identify yourself, we will retrieve your child’s materials and place them in your trunk. I would advise you to check the bag while you are still on the premises in case there is something that is obviously missing that you expected to be in the bag. That way we can try to look right then. I expect the number of cases of missing items will be slight, so we should be able to accommodate any request to look for something specific. When you come to pick things up, we hope you will also return school property like textbooks, library books, calculators, uniforms and the like. Only seniors need to return their Chromebooks, if you borrowed them from us.

The principal for each school either already has or soon will send a separate message to the families in that school about that school’s plan. And the plans for each building will also be posted to the page for that school on our website. Because we have so many families with multiple children in multiple schools, I created a table that summarizes the plans for the entire district on one page and that can be found on our home page. Scroll under News and Announcements section to find that table.

Tomorrow I will be back with more Pine Bush updates.

Have a good evening.

Tim O. Mains, Pine Bush Superintendent