NewCanaanite.com (https://newcanaanite.com/category/new-canaan-news/around-new-canaan/page/3)
This is our New Canaan news catch-all category—stories about traffic calming, public parks, local weather, human services efforts and other quality of life matters facing New Canaanites.
The Carriage Barn Arts Center opens its 46th Annual Juried Photography Show this weekend, with a reception scheduled for 4 to 6 p.m. Saturday. It runs Jan. 31 to March 5. The exhibition juror is Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., executive director of The Gordon Parks Foundation. Special events include “The Legacy of Gordon Parks,” presented by Kunhardt Feb.
New Canaan’s Norton family on Monday morning made its first-ever journey to an iconic local spot for the day after a major snowstorm. One of Darren Norton’s brothers told him that Waveny’s sledding hill “was the place to be,” he told NewCanaanite.com from an area cleared by the donor-supported Waveny Park Conservancy, overlooking Anderson Pond west of the main house. “It’s our first time here,” Darren Norton said as his daughter, Sloane, wrapped up warmly, prepared for another downhill run on her orange saucer. “We love it. It’s great, super fun.”
The Nortons were among the first families to “hit the slopes” at New Canaan’s favorite park on a chilly morning after an estimated 10-plus inches of snow dropped on the town.
Update 9 p.m. Sunday
Town Hall, New Canaan Library and New Canaan Public Schools will be closed Monday, as the town digs out of a winter storm where snowfall was followed by sleet and rain, causing dangerous road conditions. An estimated 10-plus inches of snow fell on the town. Original Article 12 p.m. Sunday
New Canaanites awoke Sunday to a blanket of white amid a widely anticipated winter storm that’s expected to continue walloping the town and much of the northeast and nation overnight. The National Weather Service is calling for up to 16 inches of snowfall as New Canaan, and all of southern Fairfield County, remain under a Winter Storm Warning through 1 p.m. Monday. “Sleet may mix in with the snow late this evening,” according to the NWS.
A former employee of New Canaan Public Schools on Tuesday sued the Board of Education, saying age and race played a role in her demotion and dismissal about two years ago. Employed by NCPS since 2004, the plaintiff, Giovanna Cicirello, is white and was 57 at the time of her dismissal in January 2024, according to a complaint filed in state Superior Court by attorney John T. Bochanis of Bridgeport-based Daly, Weihing & Bochanis LLC. She worked as kitchen manager at South School, and her supervisor was younger and Hispanic, the complaint said.
“During Plaintiff’s employment with the Defendant, Plaintiff supervised two employees which two employees were younger than the Plaintiff and Hispanic,” the complaint said. It continued: “The two employees raised complaints about Plaintiff’s supervision of them. Such complaints were unfounded.
When he first heard this quote from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter” — Yanfer Martinez, a senior at New Canaan High School and ABC scholar, thought only of historically significant moments of great injustice. Yet Martinez soon realized that “it was also about the small moments, the quiet ones, the moments where speaking feels uncomfortable,” he recalled Monday morning from the podium at United Methodist Church of New Canaan, addressing more than 150 people gathered for an annual service honoring King’s life and legacy. “I grew up in a Dominican household in Bridgeport where racism was not an abstract idea—it was something you learned early, sometimes before you had the words to explain it,” he continued. “I saw that prejudice reaches children first, how it shapes the way they see themselves long before they understand why they’re being seen differently.”
When he came to New Canaan, Martinez said, he “arrived with hope.”
“I told myself that a new place might mean a new beginning, that maybe here I could finally breathe without being watched,” he said. Yet he soon learned that the weight he had felt before “was still there.”
“It just rested on my shoulders more gently,” Martinez said.