Craig Papach, Kennedy High School's athletic coordinator and a 19-year phys. ed. teacher, had long heard the stories of poverty and loneliness, and he wanted to help. So, on Thanksgiving morning, he and his family piled into their car and made the trek from their suburban home in a quiet Wantagh neighborhood to a tiny church on Beach 94th Street in Queens. They went to lend their hands and, equally important, their ears to a day-long effort to aid the homeless. Papach was one of 10 Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District teachers who joined roughly 100 volunteers from Rock and Wrap It Up, a Five Towns-based nonprofit group founded by Syd Mandelbaum, to feed hundreds of impoverished street denizens, some of whom had not eaten for days. more

Saul Lerner, the Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District athletic director, recently resigned his post as coordinator of the Nassau County Boys' Basketball Committee because, he said, the Section VIII Athletic Council rejected a proposal of his to fine-tune the seeding process that ultimately determines teams' playing schedules. In 2006, Lerner was the architect of an ability-grouping system that determined a team's conference by its record. Previously, teams were assigned to conferences without much regard to their records. Rather, officials used what they called the "snake," in which teams were seeded and then laid out on a grid that wound back and forth in serpentine fashion. more

As they have at recent Central District Board of Education sessions, roughly a half-dozen parents and members of a recently formed, ad hoc community group, Time for Turf, spoke again at the Oct. 7 board meeting, reiterating their desire to see artificial-turf football fields at Calhoun, Kennedy and Mepham high schools. And, they said, they're not going away. In two recent meetings at which Time for Turf members spoke, they were unchallenged in their calls for synthetic-turf fields, with Central District officials primarily listening to their concerns and, most recently, forming a district committee to examine ways to improve all of Central's 31 athletic fields at its three high schools and two middle schools. This time, the calls for artificial turf were met by vocal opposition from Fred Kleiman, a local resident. Repeatedly noting the per-field cost for synthetic turf of more than $1 million, Kleiman said it would be "fiscally irresponsible" of the Central District to consider such a proposal, given that it would likely mean a property-tax increase amid a deep recession. more

Calhoun, Kennedy and Mepham high schools all celebrated Homecoming on Saturday, and students had a blast at the pre-game parades and at the big football games, despite all three home teams losing. Calhoun went down to Massapequa, 24-20. Kennedy lost a heartbreaker to Division, 21-20, after being up 20-0 at halftime. And Mepham was overpowered by No. 4 seed Wantagh, 30-7. more

In response to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation's and Department of Health's May report on synthetic turf, Environment and Human Health Inc., a nonprofit group based in North Haven, Conn., issued a rebuttal listing its concerns with the state's findings. Environment and Human Health describes itself as "an organization dedicated to protecting human health from environmental harms through research, education and the promotion of sound public policy." The group comprises "doctors, public health professionals and policy experts committed to the reduction of environmental health risks to individuals." more