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The Latest Town News in Tarrytown, Yonkers, Briarcliff Manor, Tuckahoe, and Mamaroneck

TARRYTOWN—Organizers behind a movement to protest the New York State Department of Education’s requirement to allow a private educational testing company to administer a test to elementary and middle-school students plan to bill the private testing company $20,000 for the time students and teachers missed from class to complete the company’s test. Students in Westchester school districts either boycotted the exams by being absent the day the tests were administered, or wrote “refused” on the test’s answer sheet.

YONKERS—The City Council unanimously approved a new budget, which jacks up property tax by 3.4 percent (leading to an average increase of about $269 per homeowner), and calls for 57 jobs to be cut, out of the 112 originally proposed.

BRIARCLIFF MANOR—The school board has retained legal counsel to defend itself against possible lawsuits from athletic fields at the district’s middle and high schools made with contaminated soil. At least three families have threatened to sue for the illnesses, and, in some instances, deaths, of their children that they attribute to exposure from hazardous chemicals discovered in the fields’ soil. The fields were closed and fenced off in 2010.

TUCKAHOE—The Immaculate Conception Church Fair, held at ICC, was brought to a screeching halt when police officers from six jurisdictions were needed to control a crowd of unruly teenagers. Two
16 year olds were arrested and one police officer was injured.

MAMARONECK—For a hidden-camera segment on the Today show, local police helped the show stage an experiment in which fake missing child posters were displayed prominently in Boiano Bakery on Mamaroneck Avenue. The “missing” child (an actress hired for the experiment) walked into the shop on the arm of an adult male, and the hidden cameras recorded the customers’ responses. People contacted police to report their sighting of the “missing” girl only three out of the 16 times the experiment was conducted.