Last week a local public school was closed for fire and smoke damage. The students have been transferred temporarily to a nearby middle school.
School system officials said they expect the cleanup to take two to three weeks. Most of the damage, according to fire officials, is from the oily smoke generated by the fire, which apparently started Sunday afternoon when material from a faulty neon light fell onto a couch. The kindergarten rooms in particular sustained heavy smoke damage, and the teachers at my school are responding by donating classroom supplies to help return the rooms to their original condition. We have chosen about 100 picture books from the library to be distributed to individual classrooms. Teaching is a caring profession, and we all want to do what we can for our colleagues.
We also have a Tuckahoe here, just a couple of towns over from us.