New Year's Message from Assemblywoman Amy Paulin
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Here is a letter from New York State Assemblywoman Amy Paulin discussing her progress in 2014: Happy New Year! Because of your continued support, next week I will begin a new legislative session in the NYS State Assembly. I have spent the last few months preparing for another active and challenging year. As always, my goal is to serve my district vigorously, and to make sure my constituents’ interests are given a high priority in the NYS legislature. 
In 2014, I sponsored 33 bills that passed the Assembly, 18 of which Governor Cuomo signed, putting me in the top 1% of legislators whose bills became law. Among these new laws, one of the most important would compel the Port Authority to comply with the Freedom of Information Laws in New York and the Open Public Records Act in New Jersey.
As the Chair of the Energy Committee I am also pleased to report that four of my bills promoting renewable energy were signed into law.
As many of you know, my mantra during the last several years has been “People Are Not For Sale.” This year I am anxious to continue my fight to help bring an end to human trafficking in New York State by passing The Trafficking Victims Protection and Justice Act. I will continue in my effort to convince my colleagues to put partisan politics aside and pass this important legislation that increases accountability for the real criminals – the buyers and traffickers who continue to fuel the growth of this massive and heinous industry. As responsible legislators, we must finally help to break the cycle of dependency, humiliation and degradation that too many young women face.
My work on behalf of New York State’s veterans is another high priority. We can’t do enough for the brave men and women who have voluntarily put themselves in harm’s way so that we can live freely and safely. My Veteran’s Pension Buyback bill passed both the Assembly and the Senate for the very first time. Although Governor Cuomo did not sign this bill, he has committed to working out an agreement in the upcoming budget.
Many of the bills I had passed this year were of benefit to the communities which I serve. Whether it was parking in Bronxville, insurance concerns in the Scarsdale school district or traffic lights in New Rochelle. I remain enthusiastic about meeting the needs of my constituents and look forward to working closely with all of my communities.
Overall, 2014 was a very busy year and I expect nothing less from 2015. I am proud of what I have accomplished for the 88th Assembly District and remain honored that I will once again be able to serve as your representative. I look forward to working with my constituents to continue the progress that we have made. As always, I can be reached at my district office at 914-723-1115 or via e-mail at [email protected].
Amy Paulin
NYS Assembly (D-88)
The Bond Has Passed! Now What?
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- Written by Joanne Wallenstein
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Now that the $18.12 mm bond has passed, how will the Scarsdale School District begin the construction process? As usual, Assistant Superintendent Linda Purvis was one step ahead of the game at the December 8 Board of Education meeting where she outlined the district's next steps assuming the passage of the bond on December 11.
Here is the plan that she outlined:
-The district will formally appoint architects KG&D as the architects of record for the school construction projects.
-They will convene building level committees to make recommendations on the details of the design work. Principals will be asked to identify faculty members and parents to serve on these committees who will look at specific design problems and refine schematics.
The district will do a request for a proposal for construction management services. Once retained this company will act as the district's representatives and serve as a liaison between the administration and the construction vendors. They will provide independent cost estimates to be compared with those provided by the architects. They will develop construction timelines and benchmarks for the work which is expected to take from 15 to 20 months, will figure out how students will be managed during the construction process and when construction will need to be halted to accommodate testing. Last they will provide onsite construction supervision and problem-solving for issues that arise. Their fee will be a percentage of the total budget and has been figured into the projections.
The Board of Education will appoint a District Construction Committee comprised of the architects, construction managers, Superintendent, Assistant Superintendent, Director of Facilities, 2 or 3 members of the Board of Education, three community members with expertise in construction and possibly a parent representative. This committee will do technical work and will meet every 2-3 weeks, usually at 8 am, for 2 years.
To finance the initial stages of the project, Purvis and her team will investigate one-year financing needs and 
make a recommendation on raising the funds for the architects fees, construction management fees, pre-construction testing, bond issuance fees and to pay for any work that can begin in the summer of 2015. The administration will ask the board to do a bond anticipation note for up to 10% of the authorized bond amount which will eventually rolled into a long term financing plan.
Two projects will be funded through outside sources:
The Madoff family will donate $300,000 in memory of their son Tyler to purchase the equipment for the new fitness center.
The Scarsdale Schools foundation will donate $2,600,000 for the creation of the Design Lab in the space now occupied by the Auto Shop at the high school.
To learn more, watch Purvis on video on demand on the Scarsdale School website here:
Expert Advice from a Local Computer Consultant
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- Written by Joanne Wallenstein
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Computer consultant Carol Wolfe, a Scarsdale resident of 16 years, is a great resource for home and business technology users. If you need advice about your computer, iPad or iPhone or are having trouble syncing your devices, backing up, transferring data, setting up your printer and your wireless she can help. She writes periodic blogs on her website and here's her most recent entry about backing up your computer, malware and storage:
Backing Up Your Computer:
Backing up is probably one of the most important things that you need to do to ensure your data is safe. 
Determining whether or not your computer is backing up is something you should be checking on a weekly basis.
On your Mac, check the time machine on top of your screen and make sure the latest back up is recent. Your computer should be backing up every time you use it.
All hard drives crash, whether it's the hard drive on your computer or the external hard drive that you use to back up your computer. I've had both occur to me. Over the past 7 years, I have had 3 hard drives crash on my Apple computers, one iMac, two laptops. Most recently, my external back up drive crashed. On October 6th I got the message that my computer wasn't backing up. I take these messages seriously as it can mean a whole host of things:
1. My computer hard drive has an issue
2. There is a defect with the time capsule software
3. My back up hard drive has an issue
4. There is something wrong with the wired connection or wireless connection depending on how I am backing up
If you get one of these messages, don't wait more than a day or two to seek help in resolving it. The longer you wait, the more of a chance you can lose your data. In my case, my perfectly good external hard drive stopped working after 3 1/2 years of use. I quickly purchased a new one and am now all set.
I feel that every desktop should have a dedicated external hard drive that is twice the size of the computer it's supporting and that laptops should use the Apple Time Capsule because most people don't remember to connect their laptops to an external hard drive.
Pictures: I have thought long and hard about how to save pictures and here are some of my thoughts.
1. Never reformat the SD cards that you take your pictures on. They are so cheap and so small now that it doesn't make sense to erase those picture should your
computer crash. You can purchase a 64 gig SD card for approximately $30.
2. Make sure your computer that houses your pictures is backed up
3. If you go on vacation, eject your external hard drive and put it in a safe (yes, I do this!)
4. Put an extra copy of your pictures on a cloud server. As soon as I clean up my pictures, I plan on putting them on DropBox for safekeeping. For $10 a month I
can get 1 terabyte of space on DropBox. That is a tremendous amount of space.
Be careful, however, how you import your photos into DropBox. You do NOT want to import your iPhoto library, just the jpeg files. There is a way to get access to
your route files and not go through iPhoto. If you are interested in doing this, let me know and I can take you through it. Also, never copy more than 1,000 pictures
at a time as if your computer is slow or is having issues, it can crash on you (which goes with my other mantra, don't try and do too many things at once).
Q. So what do you do if your computer crashes and you have no backup?
Data recovery can be very expensive. If you take your computer to the Apple store, the first thing they will ask you is if you have a backup. If you don't then they will recommend you take it to a data recovery center to back up your data. Until recently, the Apple store in Greenwich was a lot more generous then the one in Westchester. They were giving customers their corrupted hard drive while so they could find a place to recover their data. If you bring me a native hard drive (out of the computer) I can access the data for you.
The Greenwich Computer Supercenter does data recovery as does MicroCenter in Yonkers. Also, if you have an old PC that has files on it that you can no longer access, I can access the hard drive and place the data on a flash drive or an external hard drive for you.
Malware:
I have seen several computers lately that had malware on it. It can be incredibly annoying and will redirect your web searches, pull up unwanted pornography sites and cause unwanted popups on Google Chrome, Safari and Firefox. If you are getting messages from Tuneupmymac, Mackeeper, MacDefender, Conduit as a websearch (through extensions in your Safari preferences), vsearch, etc... Here is an article on the Apple discussion page that discusses malware. If you have malware, you can book an appointment with the genius bar at Apple or I can come over and help remove it from your computer.
Should you read the link, I do have OpenDNS set up on my router which I feel has prevented malware from getting onto my computers.
Q: iCloud Storage is full and my iPhone and iPad aren't backing up to the cloud...
The iCloud only gives you 5 gigabytes of space on their cloud for free. The main things that iCloud stores are:
1. Photos (not photo stream, but your camera roll which are the pictures and videos that reside on your phone's hard drive
2. Mail (if you have a .mac, .me, .iCloud account that you actively use for email)
3. Apps
4. Documents
To reduce your iCloud usage, you can:
1. Clean up your email and delete irrelevant emails: I see a lot of unopened emails from online retail stores and associations- if you are no longer purchasing from these stores, UNSUBSCRIBE.
2. Delete unnecessary photos or videos (if you connect your iPhone or iPad to your computer and launch iPhoto, you can import all of your pictures onto your
computer)
3. Delete the number of Apps that are being backed up. This will not delete the Apps from your device, but will delete any data on the Apps (such as Candy Crush
scores, etc...I don't play but I understand it's very addictive)
4. Delete documents that are being saved to the cloud.
If you share the same Apple ID amongst an iPhone AND an iPad, 5 gigabytes is not a lot of storage. The rates, however, to purchase more storage on iCloud have gone done tremendously over the past several years.
Monthly Prices:
20 gigabytes: $ .99
200 gigabytes: $3.99
500 gigabytes: $9.99
20 gigabytes should be more than ample space for most people and at $12/year, that is far less then the $100/year Apple used to charge for cloud storage.
If you have any questions or are interested in any other topics please feel free to contact Carol Wolfe at [email protected], or visit her website at www.csjconsultants.com.
A World of Summer Fun at the PTA Summer Activities Fair
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- Written by Megan Shelton
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The much anticipated Scarsdale High School Summer Activities Fair was hosted by the PTA on Wednesday night December 3rd. Over fifty vendors participated in the event in the hope of wooing students to their summer and gap year programs at the PTA's biggest fundraiser of the year. They offered every type of activitiy and adventure imaginable including travel, college experiences, sports, community service, drama, language immersion, art and more.
Walking through the throngs of people, I was amazed at all the different ways one could spend their summer. The first vendor I stopped at was The Barat Foundation, a non-profit organization founded by Chandri Barat. This summer program brings high school students "from all over the country and sometimes, even from all over the world" to Aix en Provence, a city in southern France, to enhance their French language skills and understanding of French culture. Students take art history classes and French language classes taught by native French speakers during the day. Some days, after their lessons, students teach English to French students ages three to eleven. Other days are blocked out specifically for excursions to places like the Camargue nature preserve or the city of Arles. Rachel Haber, a junior at Scarsdale High School who spent her summer in Aix en Provence with the foundation last year said she had learned "many wonderful lessons on this trip and had memories that she knows she'll never forget. "More than anything," she said, "I learned and gained an appreciation for French culture which gave me motivation to keep taking French classes in high school. In Aix en Provence, we were literally living in the most luxurious place and we had mountains surrounding us and we got to do art all the time. Also the food was amazing and it was just a dream experience!"
Next, I stopped at the table manned by Brian Kooperman, the owner and director of Bridgton Sports Camp for boys. Mr. Kooperman told me about his mission to help his campers improve their athletic skills alongside expert coaches and counselors. Located in Bridgton, Maine, campers can run around on the fields, lounge in the dorms, and even go waterskiing and swim in the lake. "While at camp, boys can major in a specific sport: either basketball, baseball, hockey, soccer, or lacrosse. So, they get good instruction in that sport, but they can also minor in all the other sports and enjoy the water and other activities. The boys get a traditional camp experience but with a higher level of sports instruction."
Aside from summer programs, there were also many gap year opportunities available. As I wandered around the cafeteria, I came across a table in the back, filled with African tribal masks and huge notebooks with detailed accounts of individuals' stories of their times in Africa and Haiti. As I stopped to take a couple pictures of his table as well as of some of the people poking around his table, Jay asked me if I was a photographer. I told him, no, I'm only a high school senior who hopes to be a journalist. As soon as he heard that, he started telling me about the summer and gap year programs run by his family's non-profit organization called "Leadership Exchange". First, Jay told me about a summer photography and conservation workshop held in Botswana. "The trip works with everybody from beginners to experts," Jay started, "and we work on everything from shutter speeds to lighting. We teach you everything about being a photographer; not just how to take a picture but how to think like a photographer." Both my friendand I thought this sounded like such a good time, we had to let him tell us about the gap year program. "For high school graduates, we offer a year-long program to learn how to be a safari guide. You spend six weeks learning the training and then you spend six months in the field, actually being a safari guide. Following that, there are opportunities for employment, where you then can become a safari guide in South Africa. So, you would actually be driving tourists around and teaching them about the animals. It's definitely a big adventure program."
As I was leaving the event, I stopped by the Youth Employment Services (YES) Table where my mother and her friend, Ronnie Hersch, were working. "Capable Scarsdale students" that sign up with the Scarsdale High School Yes Office are matched with employers within the community based on their skills and interests. Students can even find jobs through the YES Office once they have graduated from the high school, as a YES Office membership lasts until students turn twenty-five. Mrs. Hersch and my mother, Jane, were both thrilled at how many students and employers were signing up with the Scarsdale High School YES Office. Mrs. Hersch told me that the YES Office has some "wonderful jobs available: computer work, babysitting, and summer jobs like camp counselors, mothers helpers, lifeguards, and so on. So, people should register with us. Our website is https://scarsdale.ny.hs-ses.com. We are staffed by parent volunteers and community volunteers and we have no financial support from the PTA or the Scarsdale village, so if anyone would like to support our organization or donate, either are greatly appreciated."
It seemed like there was an endless amount of summer and gap year possibilities to explore. To see a list of all the different organizations that were present or just to ask questions about the summer activities fair, contact the Scarsdale High School PTA at [email protected]
How to Find Gardeners Who Mulch
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Perhaps all the talk about the benefits of mulching your leaves in place has convinced you that it's the right thing to do – but here's the harder part: How do you convince your gardener/landscaper to make the change?
I attempted to speak to the person who mows our lawn about purchasing the mulching blade on two occasions. Both times, from the look on his face, I could see that he was just pretending to understand what I was saying or was dead set against it and attempting to be polite. He nodded his head, failed to follow up and most likely is hoping that I will soon forget about it.
But with all the attention that the Village is putting toward getting the word out, it's not something we can just ignore. Sitting in my home office listening to leaf blowers I am yet again reminded to either get through to my gardener or seek out some alternatives for next year. For those who want to learn more, The village Board of Trustees will hold a hearing on a potential change in leaf collection practices from loose leaf pickup to bagged leaf pick up on Tuesday on 11/25 at 6pm in Village Hall and the public is invited to attend.
I asked Michelle Sterling, Chair of the Scarsdale Forum Sustainability Committee how locals can find gardeners who mulch and she referred me to the Love 'Em and Leave 'Em website (http://www.leleny.org/) where there is a listing of landscapers who are on board. Check it out here:
She also mentioned that her landscaper, Damian Landscaping at 914-632-7867 or 914-497-1509 is an avid mulcher who is taking care of many homes in Scarsdale.
Does your landscaper mulch your leaves? If so, add their name and contact information in the comments section below.
