pavilion central schools

Pavilion Central School District's board of education has approved a $19,178,078 budget with a 2.9% tax levy increase.

District residents will be asked to vote on the proposed plan on May 21 in the high school auditorium lobby.

The tax levy increase is under the 3.3 percent tax cap ceiling.

Superintended Mary Kate Hoffman said The budget reflects a 1.64% increase in spending from last year.

One teaching position, created with COVID relief funds, has been reduced from one full-time equivalent to a half-FTE position.

Hoffman said the district is creating at the elementary school a 12:1:1 classroom, which is a special education class with 12 students, one special ed teacher and one aide.

"We are using existing staff to better meet the needs of our students," Hoffman said. "This classroom will allow us to keep students with special needs in the district."

The budget includes funding for a $100,000 capital outlay exception project and the purchase of two buses.  

By Darrell Upright and the PCS Introduction Journalism Class

Tuesday night, Pavilion Central School hosted its first-ever full-district community event, “Eclipse Learning Night,” in preparation for the  April 8 total solar eclipse. 

Hosted nearly two weeks before the celestial occurrence, 400 students and their families mobbed the Middle-High school’s gymnasium, auditorium, and library and visited participating classrooms that sponsored eclipse-related activities.  All told, more than 600 people attended the event, held from 5 to 7:30 p.m. 

Planned by the science department staff and an ad hoc committee that started preparations in October, the event was a success for the school. 

“This exceeded expectations for attendance and involvement,” said Mr. Brian Mullin, English 12 teacher. 

Among the activities visited by students on Tuesday night were two presentations by Dr. Aaron Steinhauer, professor of Astronomy at SUNY Geneseo; the Star Lab, a portable planetarium in the school’s auditorium; readings by PCS staff of Colleen Onuffer’s “Genny Sees the Eclipse” (illustrated by Andy Reddout); the Middle-High School Book Fair; Trivia Night; concessions from Papa Roni’s and Yummie’s Ice Cream from Warsaw – who sold a special flavor created for the event, Gopher Galaxy;  and teacher-and-student-created presentations and displays to inform the public about the eclipse featuring work from students in grades Kindergarten to 12.

Students and family members also received eclipse glasses at the event. 

“We’re doing this prior to the eclipse for the community,” said Dr. Amanda Cook, the Director of Curriculum and Instruction, who planned the event with the Science Department and committee members. “From a safety standpoint, there was a concern that the public may not be familiar with” some of the dangers associated with a full solar eclipse: severe injury to the retina if viewers don’t use filtered glasses. 

“We want to share the significance of a very rare event,” she added. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon.” 

Many of the students’ projects capitalized on the eclipse's importance.

According to “GeneSEE the Eclipse,” the Genesee County web page (https://visitgeneseeny.com/2024-eclipse) informing residents about it, the last full solar eclipse visible in our area was in 1925, and the next will take place in 2144.

Attendees were enthused by the event.  “I like science personally, so I like it so far.  It’s great for us (in the PCS district) because we don’t have to go anywhere” to learn about the eclipse, said 10th grader Jackson True while doing the PCS English Department’s “blackout poetry” exercise, one of numerous activities planned by school staff. 

According to the “GeneSEE the Eclipse” web page, the Monday, April 8th event will darken the sky in Genesee County, which is directly in the “path of totality.” People will experience 3 minutes and 42 seconds of full eclipse beginning at 3:19 p.m. and a partial eclipse for nearly two and a half hours. 

Photos by Darrell Upright

EDITOR'S NOTE: The Introduction to Journalism class at Pavilion Central Schools is taught by Michael Iten and is, as far as we know, the only Intro to Journalism class in Genesee County.

Since it was a small turnout in the Pavilion High School Auditorium on Thursday evening, Don Shomette, a school safety consultant, decided to have a conversation instead of his planned presentation.

He took questions and offered answers.

Those answers included three rules for staying safe if you find yourself in public during a safety crisis, such as an active shooter: act fast, get space and separation, and survive.

"Run, Hide, and fight -- I like it because nobody created it," Shomette said. "It wasn't as if someone sat down and said, 'You know what I'm going to do? I'm gonna go ahead and create a strategy that people can use to make themselves safer. That's not what they did. What happened was we watched a million people react to violence, and we said, 'Oh, everybody does one of three things. They run, hide or fight, or they do a combination of it. What I love about it is all of us will naturally do it."

Shomette is a former Marine, combat veteran, and former school resource officer with more than 30 years of security experience.  He has consulted with police departments, municipalities, and school districts nationally.  He provided the district with a vulnerability assessment based on personal visits inventorying all aspects of the campuses, as well as staff development training and Thursday's community meeting.

The low turnout for his talk on Thursday -- less than a dozen people -- was actually a good sign, Shomette said.  It is a sign there isn't a lot of anxiety about potential violence within the district and that there hasn't been a tragic or troublesome event in the area recently.

Advice for responding to violent acts
As for his advice, if you're in the proximity of violence, acting quickly can help save your life, and the thing you are most likely to think about first is getting away from the violence, Shomette said.

"If you're in a room and you hear what sounds like fireworks or firecrackers, chances are it means that the violence is far away from you, or it's not extremely close to you," Shomette said. "In that case, I would run to the door, close the door, lock the door and get out of the way. I'd stay in the room. Chances are, that might be the best thing to do. Okay, why stay in the room? If you can close and lock a classroom door, you have about a 99 percent chance that no threat will enter the classroom. That is, statistically speaking, what school attackers do is they tend not to destroy doors; they try the handle, and then they move on. So if you're in a classroom and you hear what sounds like firecrackers, my advice to you is if you can get to the door and close and lock it, stay there."

That's creating space - you're putting a physical object between you and the attacker.

If you're in the hallway, he said, you need to create distance. That means running.

"I will say that the vast majority of people who go outside tend to survive," Shomette said.

He cautioned, though, that you want to be sure you're running away from the violence and not toward it. 

Prioritizing survival is fighting, Shomette said. You're fighting to survive.

"You have to adopt the mindset right now that you're going to do anything you had to do to survive," he said.

He told the story of two people at a mass shooting who crawled into a hole in the wall that officials couldn't believe one person could fit in, let alone two.

When it comes to fighting back, that is a matter of assessing your situation and understanding what you've trained or practiced to do.  Some people are better equipped based on size alone or the equipment they care to provide physical resistance to an attacker.  He drew attention to, for example, School Resource Officer Trevor Sherwood, who was in attendance and is a large man, a trained peace officer who, if on campus, is probably properly equipped to fight back.

"Typically, we think of fighting as going physical," Shomette said. "If you can go physical, go physical. Trevor, stand up. I want you to look at Trevor. Trevor should go physical, don't you agree? Thanks, Trevor. I mean, I would bring Trevor with me and put him in a glass cage and just break it and say, Trevor, take care of it. If I told Trevor not to fight or as a last resort fight, it would be crazy because Trevor is trained; it's his natural, probably, proclivity. It's what he's going to be leaning towards."

But not everybody is well suited to taking on an attacker. Most people aren't, in fact. That's where space and distance comes into play, which Shomette said is also fighting because it's about surviving.

"The deal is 99 percent of people do not first think of physically fighting," Shomette said. "They tend to be 1 percent of people who physically fight. So don't be discouraged by this. Everybody fights in a crisis. If you run, you're fighting. If you hide, you're fighting. If you survive, you're fighting.”

Protecting yourself
Since students can't carry pepper spray, one young woman asked about carrying hair spray as a defensive weapon. 

That's fine if you're practiced in how you would deploy so that you're ready to react in a tense, life-threatening situation, Shomette said, but space and distance may still be your better option if it is an option.

"I would not, however, bank on the idea that I'm going to do something brand new that I've never done before," Shomette said.

When Shomette was a young police officer, he was provided with pepper spray and not a lot of training or practice time on using it.  He was pretty horrible with it as a defensive tool at first, he admitted.  One time he accidentally sprayed his partner in the face with it.

"That was the worst feeling in the world, seeing that red go on his face," Shomette said. "I felt very comfortable using it."

He eventually became proficient, but it took time.

He recalled a mass shooting in a bar, where dozens of adult customers were standing around with beer bottles in their hands.

"How many grown-ups threw a bottle at the attacker? None of them," Shomette said. "None of them, and you would think that they would do it. But the deal is when a crisis happens -- here's this part that it's hard to describe, and it's kind of painful to say, but during an extremely violent act, it is unlike anything you've ever experienced. You can you can feel it. You'll feel the vibrations. You can feel things hitting you. You smell things. In extreme violence, you can smell things that you never thought about. 

"I look at photos of some things that have happened that I've been involved in, and I still remember what that smelled like. I remembered the smell that was there in extreme violence. I don't know if it's from the room or from the weapons being discharged, but I can remember tasting metal. I look at some photos, and I taste metal. I guess my point is that stay away from extreme violence and get away from it. It is shocking. It is incredibly unnerving. You tend to fall back on the things that you feel most comfortable doing."

Mental health
Shomette started his discussion by sharing his views on the primary cause of mass violence -- mental illness, and the fact that mental health is what society needs to address and what parents need to see as a primary need of their own children.

"There are lots of people who believe what's happening is because of lots of reasons," Shomette said. "I won't go into all the reasons, but they are heavy, big-time debates.  ... This is me. My thoughts. The number one problem, or the number one driver for me, about why we have school attacks is because of mental health, hands down. Why do I say this? I just don't say it because I believe it. I study school attackers. I put on classes for police officers that are five days in a row, eight hours a day. All we do is talk about school attackers, who they are, and what they do. 

"I'm not trying to be insensitive, but after every school attack, the newspaper could read, 'We have learned nothing new.' We've learned nothing new for the last 10 years. We have known everything about school attackers, there is nothing new. Every time, it's shocking, but there's nothing new. The mental health aspect is, without a doubt  -- I think every school attacker suffers from mental health illness because they've had a break with reality and they believe it's okay to take a life. Would you agree that that's totally unhealthy? So I think by the act itself, whether they were diagnosed mentally ill or not, it doesn't matter, in the act of murdering an innocent person, you have proven that you are mentally ill."

Parents, he said, watch your kids and make sure they overcome the barriers they encounter in life and enjoy life.

"Are you ready? I have eight kids," Shomette said. "I am super vigilant, hyper-vigilant. I look at all my kids, and I think about these things on a very personal level. If you live life well, I think you tend not to choose violence. I worry that people who don't live life well long enough, they go down. We make the mistake of just going out there and saying they're mentally ill, but they're really not mentally ill. 

“They say that whatever you practice, you become good at whatever it is you practice,” he said. “So, if you have kids, my advice is to do everything you can to help them live well. If kids can live well, I think we'll get rid of most of our issues and problems."

Pavilion Central School District is in the early phase of planning its next significant building and renovation project.

It's seeking bids from architectural/engineering firms to help it map out updates and upgrades at its two main school buildings, D.B. Bunce Elementary School and Pavilion Junior-Senior High School, which totals 275,800 square feet of education space.

The estimated budget for the project is between $20 million and $24 million.

The project is expected to include at least:

• Replacement of boiler plants in both buildings;
• Renovation of media centers in both buildings;
• Expansion and renovation of one wing of the junior-senior high;
• An upgrade to the fire alarm and security system at the junior-senior high;
• An upgrade to theatrical lighting, sound, and projection in the auditorium; and,
• The replacement of playgrounds.

The selected firm will perform design and construction-related services, including architectural, and engineering for all elements of construction.

The district expects to hire the firm with the winning bid in January with board review and voter approval requested in the fall.  Planning documents will begin the regulatory planning process in the summer of 2025. If all that goes as planned, construction will begin in the summer of 2025, with completion in the winter of 2026.

Bids are due by 3 p.m. on Jan. 10.

The Request for Proposal, which is a document for companies being asked to bid on a project, does not contain financial data beyond the broad cost estimate. The financial plan for paying for the project will be developed by district staff and approved by the board before a public vote on the proposal. Typically, these projects are paid for primarily through state aid.

To read the complete RFP, click here.

Like every other school district in the nation, Pavilion Central School District teachers and administrators are frustrated by the distractions and problems created by students with mobile communication devices, particularly mobile phones.

"When you ask teachers, what's the one thing we could do to get kids more focused in school and in the classroom, it would probably be the removal of cell phones," said Charles Martelle, Pavilion's high school principal. "That doesn't mean we can come up with a way to do it that doesn't cause more distractions."

It's a problem even in elementary school, said principal Tom Wilson, and Carin Wade, a ninth-grade language teacher, chimed in with, "It's awful."

She added, "They can put it in their pockets and you don't even see it. They can text without looking at their phones.  I mean, you've got 25 kids in a classroom and you can't -- it's terrible."

During the discussion of outright bans, Wade said it's been tried at Pavilion, and parents complained.

Parents, one administrator said, are part of the problem.

"I understand the safety side of it, but at the end of the day, parents shouldn't be texting their kids during class," he said.

"And they know they are," Wade said. "They know their kids are in class, and the kids will be like, 'But it's my mom,' and I'm like, 'OK, but you're in class. I don't understand.'"

The policy for 2023-24 will be the same as last academic year, which uses a color-coded system to let students know where and when they can touch their phones.

In the green zones -- hallways and the cafeteria, they get close to unlimited access to their phones (they're not supposed to take pictures or make audio or video clips).  In gold zones, such as most classrooms, they can only access a phone with teacher permission. And in red zones, phones cannot be touched or displayed at all. This includes bathrooms, locker rooms, and the auditorium.

If a student is caught in violation of the policy, a staff member can collect the phone and leave it in the main office, where a parent or guardian must pick it up.

The discussion at Monday's meeting indicated even this policy leaves much to be desired when it comes to limiting distractions caused by electronic devices.

Schools have tried outright bans, but Martelle said there's no evidence these bans achieve favorable outcomes. Some schools have tried lockable pouches that students must store the device during the school day, getting the pouch unlocked by a staff member at the end of the day, but some school districts, Martelle said, found that students use "burner phones," phones they don't really use, to dump in the pouches.

"If there's a plan that actually worked and serves our interests that was more strict, we would use it," Martelle said. "I think a lot of schools are (implementing more strict policies), so we'll be able to look at articles and literature and studies. Right now, it's really up in the air. The studies as to whether or not schools that have done this versus those that haven't, the studies are really kind of inconclusive. We're looking at different things as to whether it actually improves anything in schools or not or whether it's effective."

He said administrators are open-minded about finding a better way of dealing with the problem.

"It's a very difficult problem right now," he said.

Rex Eighmey, the director of facilities for the Pavilion Central School District, gave the Board of Education on Monday a complete rundown of all the work his staff is performing during the summer months.

It's more than just keeping the lawns mowed and the floors buffed -- which board members praised as always extra shiny -- it's repairs and upgrades, among other items.

A few of the items he mentioned:

• Clean all furniture, windows, floors, ceilings;
• Perform maintenance on the HVAC system;
• Unpack and assemble new furniture that comes in and place in the appropriate rooms;
• Retrofit some of the high-pressure sodium lights outside with LEDs;
• Clean and repair concession stands at sports fields;
• Maintain and repair sports fields;
• Repair baseball and softball dugouts;
• Replace some whiteboards and blackboards in classrooms; and,
• Replace condensation pumps in the cafeteria.

Among several other items that have kept work crews busy all summer.

Serving as a high school sports coach takes a lot more than understanding where to put the Xs and Os if school districts are to abide by New York State regulations, a Matt Roth, athletic director in Pavilion, laid out for the Pavilion Board of Education on Monday night.

Non-teacher coaches have a multi-year program of classes they need to take and that total cost to the coach can exceed $700.

"This is for any coach who is board-approved," Roth said. "They have to have all of these classes. They can't just show up and help out anymore."

For the non-teacher coach, there are nine steps that must be completed at the time of application.  It's about a two-month process to get the initial temporary coaching license, Roth said.

"When I came here two years ago, I kind of went through this with everybody, but I just wanted to give everybody a refresher on it," Roth told the board at the start of his report.

The candidate must submit evidence of an acceptable first aid and CPR course completion along with completion of a child abuse identification worship, a school violence and prevention and intervention worship, and training in dealing with harassment, bullying, cyber-bullying and discrimination in schools. The would-be couch must also submit fingerprints and be cleared through a database check.

Then they are eligible to coach for one or two years on a temporary license. They must pay a $50 fee for each sport they wish to coach.

In years three, four, and five, they must complete a fundamentals of coaching course, along with courses on contusions, protecting students from abuse, and a course on student cardiac arrest.

In the next level, they must complete courses in student mental health and suicide prevention, heat illness prevention, first aid for coaches, and a sport-specific course. 

If the non-teacher coach is still going in year six, then the coach needs to apply for a professional coaching license.  

At that point, the coach must complete course in bullying and hazing, strength and conditioning, teaching and modeling behavior, engaging effectively with parents, and sportsmanship.

The courses are offered online by the National Federation of High School Sports, and most are free, but some have fees ranging from $25 to $50.

The professional coach must reapply for a license every three years, which involves refresher courses in first aid and CPR, along with a positive evaluation from the athletic director.

"The teacher coaching requirements, they are a little bit easier because they've already taken some of the coursework," Roth said. "A teacher only needs to have first aid and CPR to get started in their first three years, and then they are supposed to complete the same courses that nonteacher coaches have at two years and complete levels one, two and three within five years of starting."