By Jesse Serwer
With the village set to repair Shepherd Street - the main entranceway to the school - and the school also planning to refurbish its parking lot and internal roadway, cars will have to enter the premises through a currently closed backdoor gate located at Knollwood Road and Fireman's Field. The district typically holds most of its optional and required summer school classes at South Side Middle School, but with that school closed all summer for infrastructure repairs, all of the district's non pre-K programs have been redirected to South Side High School.
While the district will provide a limited amount of bus service to students who would typically attend programs at the middle school, it expects between 500-700 cars a day to pick up and drop off the more than 1,200 students who will attend the Monday-Thursday programs. The result is expected to create an intense traffic situation at a location where traffic is already a concern.
"On a normal school day it is horrible so I can't imagine how backed up it would get with all this road work," said South Side High School PTA Co-President Pat Russo, who recalled encountering "awful" traffic when her son attended a summer program at South Side Middle School.
"We are stuck with a real dilemma," district Superintendent William Johnson told parents and board members at a March 22 meeting of the Rockville Centre Board of Education. "I am not convinced that we can do what we want to this summer and provide a safe environment for the entrance and exit of kids. There is this work that we feel needs to be done but it is creating a very difficult situation."
With money available from the capital bond issue passed by village residents in December, the district is planning to re-pave the asphalt in South Side's parking lot and roadway for the first time since the mid 1950s. The superintendent said that spreading the work out over a longer period of time than allotted by the summer break is a possibility, but that the cost could be prohibitive.
"The asphalt is in a sorry state of repair, and it could get worse," Johnson added.
Like the school repaving effort, the village's repairs to Shepherd Street are also a long time in coming. They are set to be taken care of this summer just as soon as school lets out at the end of June, said Village Administrator Ron Wasson.
"We are going to do a heavy lift which means four inches of asphalt instead of two and a half," Wasson said. "We have to do even more than usual because of the bus traffic that this street gets. We like to do things once," said Wasson. "If you are going to do it, do it the right way."
The expected traffic backup had district officials bandying about a number of possible alternatives at the board of education meeting.
To avoid the traffic mess, School Board President Marcia Hirsch said, "The district is looking at different options." One option being considered is the relocation of certain programs to another school outside the district.
Said Hirsch, "The [summer school] program would be way too large to put in a single elementary [school] but we are contacting the neighboring school districts like Baldwin and Oceanside to see if there are any spaces there where we could hold the programs. We may be calling in a traffic consultant to give us some advice."
Comments on this story? JSerwer@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 221.
