Long Beach
HERALD Also serving Point Lookout & East Atlantic Beach
Meet the 4th C.D. candiadates
MlK Center remains closed
Your hometown heroes
Page 03
Page 15
Page 12-13
$1.00
OCTOBER 15 - 21, 2020
VOl. 31 NO. 42
Covid will cost schools nearly $4 million ers, he said, the district would not have to hire substitutes in certain schools, though he did The Long Beach School Dis- not specify which ones. trict is projecting $3.7 million in At a cost of more than $1.2 coronavirus-related expenses, million, the district also hired 43 including personal teaching assistants protective equipand aides to help in ment and extra staffclassrooms, halling to deal with new ways and nurse’s schedules and protooffices and monitor cols this school year. restrooms. At a Board of DeVito said that Education meeting most of the new auxon Tuesday night, iliary staff are partMichael DeVito, the t i m e, a n d t h e i r district’s assistant r a n k s wo u l d b e superintendent of reduced if the disfinance and operatrict had to return to tions, presented the remote learning. c o s t s a s s o c i at e d He added that the with keeping projected $1.2 milschools open during lion cost would be the pandemic. “The DR. DENNis for the entire school cost involved in RYaN year. “If we do have these additional preto go virtual,” he c a u t i o n s i s a n Board of Education said, “some of these unfunded mandate trustee costs would be that required emerreduced.” gency expenditures District officials outside of our approved budget,” anticipate spending just over DeVito said. $733,000 on personal protective He explained that the district equipment, cleaning materials had to hire 23.1 full-time teach- and teaching supplies, and more ers, or equivalent, at a cost of than $130,000 on Chromebooks about $2.3 million, to help with for students. the district’s virtual-instruction But DeVito pointed out that program. By hiring these teachContinued on page 7
By DaRwiN YaNEs dyanes@liherald.com
i
Christina Daly/Herald
TRixiE ThE TRiCERaTOps greeted guests at the end of the tour with Rashaun Simmons where they could take a keepsake photo with her and other dinosaurs in the background.
Travel back 250 million years, to where dinosaurs ‘live’ By JaMEs BERNsTEiN jbernstein@liherald.com
The dinos are back, briefly. In 1980, a father-and-son paleontology team, Luis and Walter Alvarez, theorized that dinosaurs became extinct about 66 million years ago, when a meteor the size of a bus smashed into Earth, destroying the climate that allowed the giant animals to thrive. But we have never lost our fascination with the beasts
that were themselves the size of buses. And for a few more weeks, dinosaurs are back, at Hempstead Town Park at Point Lookout — animatronic versions of them, anyway. A Texas-based company, Jurassic Quest, opened an exhibit at the town park on Oct. 2. It has proven so popular that it has been extended to next Monday and, depending on tur nout, may be extended again to Oct. 26. “Kids love dinosaurs,” said Naomi Torres, the director of
the show. So do adults, apparently. The cost is $49 per vehicle, and early last Sunday mor ning there were cars filled with kids and adults with cameras, piling onto one another for photos of the animals that once ruled the earth. Jurassic Quest has two animatronic shows making their way around the country. Before the coronavirus pandemic hit in March, the shows Continued on page 9
t’s another validation for why school districts need a fund balance to deal with emergencies that come up.