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Three districts team up in hockey league By HERNESTo GAlDAMEZ hgaldamez@liherald.com
Courtesy Jonathan Ciprian
Students rely on late busing to get home after tutoring sessions, clubs activities and sports.
Frustrated Kellenberg parents press their fight for late busing By NIColE FoRMISANo nformisano@liherald.com
Of the 55 school districts that see a portion of their students attend the private Kellenberg Memorial High School, 50 of them provide late busing. Lynbrook is one of the five districts that do not — and some parents are getting increasingly desperate for solutions. “We just want our children to have the same opportunities to participate in extracurricular activities that other children do in the public school,” said Kim Ciprian, whose daughter is a freshman at Kellenberg. “All of our surrounding school districts have figured out a way to make this work financially in a budget.” The Gannascolis are a one-car family. Diana works until 6 p.m., and by the time she’s able to get to Kellenberg to pick up her daughter, Viviana, a ninth-grader, it’s
well past 7. But Viviana has no other choice but to stay after dismissal — getting extra academic help is key to her success as a student, and she recently joined the Fashion Club as a way to make more friends. But the situation leaves her with no choice but to wait inside the school well into the evening, left alone after all her friends have taken their respective late buses. “From a social standpoint, we need our kids to be able to learn to be part of a community,” Ciprian said, adding that some of the most important learning takes place outside of the classroom, but it’s made inaccessible through lack of a late bus. “They can’t learn to become part of a community, to volunteer, to do spor ts, to become active. They’re being limited.” “My son’s been restricted for the past three years with sports and clubs and even just socializing with his friends,” said VanContinued on page 2
In the 2019-20 season of the High School Hockey League of Nassau County, the team representing Lynbrook, East Rockaway and Hewlett-Woodmere middle school students was making a push for the playoffs, with a lot of momentum. But then the coronavirus pandemic hit, and the season shut down jus as the first round of playoffs was about to start. Two years later, as the pandemic slowly faded and the league began preparing for the 2022-23 season, the HewlettWoodmere-based team didn’t have enough players to compete. The problem started when Lynbrook district players left the three-way parnership to join another team, with Valley Stream and Sewanhaka, leaving East Rockaway and HewlettWoodmere athletes unable to play. “The whole program basically fell apart,” Hewlett resident Lauren Sobel said. “Kids aged out, and the dads who volunteered moved on, and it took a little while, due to Covid, for everything to get back up.” The High School Hockey League of Nassau County,
established in 1995, is a nonprofit organization that helps young men and women in middle and high school develop good sportsmanship, self-discipline, self-confidence and positive decision-making skills through hockey. Its members are public and private schools with enrollments of roughly 800 students, and there are some 50 teams in three divisions: varsity, junior varsity and middle school. One mother who is close to the Rockville Centre-based teams, the Cyclones, put Sobel in contact with the president and head coach of the junior varsity team, George Barrett, to discuss the possibility of merging Hewlett-Woodmere with the Cyclones before the season started. “We had a lot of hockey players in the district, from my sons, who both play, and their friends that they were in school with,” Sobel said. “I knew they wanted to get back into it.” Her oldest son, Nathan, a Hewlett High School freshman, p l aye d o n t h e Ly n b r o o k / Hewlett/East Rockaway middle school team the last year it competed. Although he plays on a travel team, too, Nathan took Continued on page 4