mALVerNe/West HemPsteAD
Men’s Health Inside $1.00
Vol. 29 No. 27
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Malverne honors Juneteenth Page 3
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JUNE 30 - JUlY 6, 2022
Fire chief celebrates 60 years By KYlE CHIN kchin@liherald.com
W
Tim Baker/Herald
hen a smoke alarm pierces the silence of the early morning hours, the beeper of 77-yearold Dave Weinstein sounds and he springs into action. Once serving as its fire chief, Weinstein remains an active member of Malverne’s Volunteer Fire Department after 60 years of service. “I’ve lived in Malverne all my life,” said Weinstein. “My family moved here in 1943. I went to school in what is now Maurice W. Downing School, then the middle school, and finally the high school, which had only recently finished being built.” Weinstein is the first member to achieve
WEINstEIN Has sErVEd the Malverne Volunteer Fire Department for a record six decades.
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Gov. Hochul visits Chestnut Street school to push pre-K By KYlE CHIN kchin@liherald.com
Gov. Kathy Hochul visited the Chestnut Street School in West Hempstead on Wednesday, June 15, in large part to promote universal pre-kindergarten programs. State Sen. Todd Kaminsky and Assemblywoman Judy Griffin joined the governor, highlighting the additional $125 million dedicated to early child care in the 2022-23 state budget. Faith Tripp, the school’s principal, described how the pre-K program took off at the beginning of the year. “Students are chosen via a lottery system,” she
said. “This past January, we opened our first classroom. Thanks to being fully funded, we can create five classrooms for the [2022-23] school year.” The governor described how unfair it was for students not to be exposed to pre-K programs. “I made some new friends at the very first — the inaugural class — of the pre-K program,” said the governor. “These children literally won the lottery in the sense that before this past January, 50 percent of the children in this school district entered kindergarten without exposure to any kind of learning. That’s not fair to them. That’s not fair to
their families, never to have this even available to them.” Sen. Kaminsky said that while he and other legislators have pushed for expanded pre-K programs for some time, the introduction of universal pre-K to New York City schools increased their call for the same programs. “Long Island parents say, ‘New York City, just a few miles that way, has UPK. What about us?’” Kaminsky further stressed how UPK can ease the time and money burden on parents, quoting them as saying, “’Do you know how much it cost me’ — and by the way these are the
ones who could afford it — ‘to put my child in a private pre-K last year?’ “Now that they don’t have to pay that money, or now that they can go to work instead of being home, the economics changes completely for that family,” Kaminsky added. “And the studies show that those who start education early do better.”
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, a large portion of brain development occurs in the preschool years, with children reaching 90 percent of their adult brain volume before age six. The CDC also found that early childhood education is associated with improved cognitive developContinued on page 7