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St. Luke’s Plans New Turf Field for Baseball, Soccer

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St Luke’s School is seeking to install a synthetic turf field for baseball and soccer where a grass playing field now lays, according to an application that’s scheduled to come before the Planning & Zoning Commission Thursday. The turf field is not designed to expand athletic programs, will include no lighting or loudspeakers and “will not result in any significant increase in surface runoff from the site,” the school said. “The inclusion of a large, porous stone reservoir beneath the field will effectively capture and detain rainfall entering the turf field, promoting groundwater recharge and attenuating peak discharge to the piped system from this area,” according a report from Andover, Mass.-based SMRT. “The runoff and routing calculations demonstrate that the development will not result in any significant increase in the peak runoff from the site during design storm events of 2-year, 10-year, 25-year and 100-year return periods; therefore the project will have no significant impacts to downstream resources or receiving waters.”

St. Luke’s is seeking a Special Permit, as required under section 6.4.G of the New Canaan Zoning Regulations (page 115 here), to excavate more than 1,000 cubic yards of cubic earth and disturb more than 10,000 square feet of soil. In addition to the field, plans call for a new fenced backstop, first-base dugout, expanded concrete area for portable bleachers and relocation of the existing scoreboard to the would-be centerfield.

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Anonymous Local Donor Funds ‘Kay Timmis Award’ for New Canaan High School Students

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Since news of the passing of Kay Timmis broke this week, scores of New Canaan Public Schools students who through four decades had come to know the cherished substitute teacher have shared remembrances and tributes to a singular educator and human being. Now, thanks to a local parent whose kids went through the schools here and whose family is feeling the loss deeply, generations of future students will be touched by Kay’s spirit and legacy. This spring, through a fund administered by the New Canaan Community Foundation, the first-ever “Kay Timmis Award” will be presented to a deserving student. “Mrs. Timmis will be remembered this spring and every spring after that,” said New Canaan Community Foundation Executive Director Cynthia Gorey, who on Wednesday morning took a call from the town woman behind the fund—a New Canaan resident who wants to remain anonymous. “It’s a parent whose kids went through the schools and her kids had Ms. Timmis as a substitute teacher and they just were really touched by this woman and were moved to do something to honor her legacy and help people to keep remembering her for the good that she did,” Gorey said.

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‘She Was Everyone’s Grandmother’: Kay Timmis, 82, Beloved Substitute Teacher in New Canaan

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The New Canaan High School family is mourning the passing on Sunday of a beloved substitute teacher who began working in the district in the late-1970s and touched hundreds of young lives here with her rare and unflagging kindness, smile and generous spirit. Kay Timmis was 82. “We started off first period with a lot of tears” as news of Timmis’ passing moved quickly through the school, NCHS World History, Civics and AP Comparative Government and Politics teacher Kristine Goldhawk said Tuesday. “Kay was an original,” added Goldhawk, in her ninth year in the district and who saw Timmis just last week. “She was a sweetheart.

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NCHS Squash Team Funding Nixed as Board of Ed Proposes 4.87% Spending Increase

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Saying the district should prioritize the hiring of additional classroom teachers and hold off on funding varsity club sports until there’s a well-defined policy in place for doing so, the Board of Education on Monday proposed a 2015-16 operating budget that includes no money for the New Canaan High School Squash Team. The $84,809,121 proposed operating budget is the major driver of the spending on the public schools, which in turn drives about two-thirds of all town spending. The school board said it’s deferring about $255,000 in spending on educators such as a part-time writing teacher at West School, student deans at the elementary schools and three general education teaching assistants. For Board of Ed Secretary Dionna Carlson, while increased participation in extracurricular activities such as squash is a “wonderful” goal, “I think we need to prioritize where the dollars are, and I would probably say I would prefer to see that $20,000 spent on a writing specialist right now.”

“And I think maybe we are putting cart the before the horse, and maybe we should have a policy in place of how we can handle these extracurricular activities and then we fund them—instead of putting a pool there without a policy that we are reviewing as a board,” Carlson said at the meeting, held in the Wagner Room at New Canaan High School. “I think we have bigger things that we are not funding this year which are disappointing, I am sure, to many parents in the district.

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Confidence, Competition, Camaraderie: Popularity of New Canaan High School Debate Team Soars

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New Canaan High School senior Matt DeMattia strode to the podium at the front of Room 105 after school on a recent afternoon, his fellow Debate Team members—a group that represents all four grades and numbers about 45, up from a half-dozen less than a decade ago—waiting during this practice to hear him argue in favor of this statement: “College athletes should be paid competitive salaries.”

A New Canaan Rams varsity football player recently restored to the Debate Team from the gridiron (and a state title), DeMattia argued that “the American economy is built on one thing, and that is capitalism—and capitalism isn’t necessarily fair, it isn’t necessarily even, but it’s built around the fact that those who generate income get to keep that income.”

“Big football schools earn $40 million to $80 million for a single season, such as Florida or Penn State. These football players are playing for their schools and generating massive amounts of wealth for their programs and for the NCAA, and they are receiving absolutely none of this wealth. They are generating this income and by the fundamental beliefs of capitalism, they should earn this income.”

It’s a cogent, reasoned argument that the teen delivered with confidence and facts—qualities, according to Debate Team coach Kristine Goldhawk, that DeMattia has developed over three years with the group. “When he started, he was very brash and not very organized and not really logical in terms of his thought process, so he tended to ramble all over the place,” recalled Goldhawk, a NCHS teacher whose classes include World History, Civics and AP Comparative Government and Politics. “Over the course of the years, he has really tightened up his argument style.