Critical fire conditions present through NY metro area, including Long Island

Long Island Morning Edition

Long Island teachers, from public schools to the colleges, said the challenges of discussing this divisive and emotionally charged election are nearly as big as the need to discuss it. They said they planned to critically engage with the issues, foster respectful dialogue and help students make sense of this moment in time. Craig Schneider and Darwin Yanes report in NEWSDAY that teachers say they'll help students separate facts from opinions, analyze evidence and draw conclusions. “You’re supposed to be analyzing what’s being said,” said Gloria Sesso, president of the Long Island Council for the Social Studies, regarding the job of teachers. “You’re supposed to be looking at different points of view, and not indoctrinating or telling people what to think. But how to think is a very important thing.”

A good teacher, she said, helps students separate facts from opinions, analyze evidence and draw conclusions.

Peter Salins, a Stony Brook University political science professor, said a good number of his students go into politics or public service or a career, such as health care, where they have to deal with government.

Salins said he wants students to grapple with the "underlying dynamics" behind this election, such as why so many people feel discontented with the status quo.

"My whole approach to public policy is to engage in intelligent discussion," he said. "I'm trying to teach that process. How to accurately diagnose a public problem and use evidence-based information to create successful policies."

Andrea Libresco, a Hofstra professor of social studies education, said students in her honors seminar on the 2024 election were evenly split between Harris and Trump.

This election, she said, is an opportunity for students to look beyond their own opinions to understand others.

"We are all Americans. We need to practice listening with genuine curiosity," she said. "That's vital to civil discourse."

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Suffolk's social services department is redacting identifying information from reports used to consider removal of a child from a home, county officials said yesterday. The process, county officials argue, eliminates the type of "biased decision-making" that kept 8-year-old Thomas Valva in the custody of his police officer father before his death.

Grant Parpan reports in NEWSDAY that Suffolk County Social Services Commissioner John Imhof said under the new "blind removal" process implemented in the spring, Child Protective Services decision makers are no longer made aware of a parent’s occupation, the names of family members or their ethnic and religious backgrounds in cases when there is a possibility a child will be removed.

"There's absolutely no subjective information," Imhof said at Thursday's news conference announcing changes DSS has made in response to an April report from a special grand jury convened to investigate the department’s handling of the Valva case. "We all have unconscious stereotypes and views in our minds, and they have to be eliminated in the evaluation of child protective service cases."

The news conference also brought attention to areas where the county has not yet fulfilled the recommendations of the grand jury, including efforts to reduce the workload of case workers, improve pay to attract additional staff and the amendment of state laws the grand jury found shielded caseworkers from accountability in the Valva case.

"It isn’t going to happen overnight," Suffolk County Executive Ed Romaine said of the progress, adding that "change is incremental."

But Imhof said the New York State Office of Children and Family Services has already reported favorably on improvements made within the department, which includes the blind removal process. The commissioner said blind removal was mandated by the state in 2020, but was not in place when he was hired in May.

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The Commission on Veterans Patriotic Events will host its annual Veterans Day ceremony this coming Monday, November 11, at 11 a.m. at Agawam Park in Southampton Village. Prior to the service, there will be a short parade from the First Presbyterian Church, down Jobs Lane, to the park. All veterans are invited to participate and are asked to be at the church parking lot by 10:30 a.m. Cars will be available for those who cannot march. The guest speaker will be Tim Hendricks, an author and former U.S. Army tank platoon leader and military intelligence officer. That’s this coming Monday morning. The public is invited to the Southampton’s Veterans Day ceremony and afterward all are welcome for refreshments at Veterans Memorial Hall, across the street from Agawam Park in Southampton Village.

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Four people whose lives have been forever altered by a fatal Noyac fire in 2022 came face to face in Suffolk County Court in Riverside this week. T.E. McMorrow reports on 27east.com that Pamela and Peter Miller, the owners of a Noyac house where a fire claimed the lives of two young women who were staying there on vacation with their family, were sentenced in connection to the deaths yesterday in a Riverhead courtroom. Peter Miller, who had previously pleaded guilty to two counts of criminally negligent homicide, was sentenced to 3 years of probation and 200 hours of community service. His wife, Pamela Miller, who pled guilty to misdemeanor reckless endangerment, was sentenced to 100 hours of community service, which she has already completed, according to her attorney, Edward Burke Jr. But before the sentences were pronounced by Suffolk County Supreme Court Justice Richard Horowitz, the Millers stood in silence as the last two surviving members of the Wiener family, Alisa Wiener, the mother to the deceased, Jillian and Lindsay Wiener, and her son, Zach Wiener, spoke about the horror they experienced on August 3, 2022, and about the pain and suffering they have suffered since the fire. “The depth of the pain has been life altering,” Alisa Wiener told the court. “There are times I don’t recognize myself. My husband Lew was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2020,” she said, adding that he passed away last April.

The family of five who lived in Maryland were taking a one-week summer vacation in the Hamptons together before the girls returned to college. Jillian Wiener, 21, was a rising senior at University of Michigan, while Lindsay Wiener, 19, attended Tulane University.

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A red flag warning is in effect across Long Island, New York City and the lower Hudson Valley today from 8 a.m. until 6 p.m. due to expected critical fire weather conditions, the National Weather Service in New York said this morning. Denise Civiletti reports on Riverheadlocal.com that a red flag warning is issued when a combination of strong winds, low relative humidity and dry fuels will create a significantly elevated fire growth potential, the weather service said in a statement.

Sunny skies with a west wind 8 to 15 mph, gusts as high as 25 mph. and relative humidity as low as 29% are forecast today, according to the forecast. These conditions are considered critical fire conditions and when they occur, rapid fire spread can be expected, the weather service said. Any fire that develops will catch and spread quickly. Any potential ignition sources, including smoking materials such as cigarette butts should be properly extinguished, the weather service said. This is the fourth time a red flag warning has been issued in the past two months. The warnings were in effect Oct. 26-27 and Nov. 1. The warning comes as the region continues to experience unusually dry weather with near-record high temperatures this fall.

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Local veterans organizations will be holding events recognizing Veterans Day this coming Monday, Nov. 11. Nicole Wagner reports in THE SUFFOLK TIMES that Southold American Legion Griswold-Terry-Glover Post 803 welcomes community members to its annual Veterans Day ceremony on Monday at 11 a.m. on the legion’s front lawn at 51655 Main Road, Southold.

Following the ceremony, the Southold Rotary Club will serve breakfast inside the legion post. At noon, the American Legion Auxiliary and Long Island Cares will distribute free frozen turkey, chicken or ham dinners to veterans who preordered.

Members of the Riverhead community will gather Monday at 11 a.m. at the War Memorial at 330 Court St. for the annual Veterans Day remembrance, organized by the Riverhead Combined Veterans Committee. This century-old tradition honors service members on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.

Also on Monday, Calverton National Cemetery will host its annual ceremony in the assembly area at 1 p.m. to commemorate the service and sacrifice of our nation’s veterans, orchestrated by the Support Committee for Calverton National Cemetery.

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A growing percentage of Long Island households own their home without a mortgage, which raises questions about how these mortgage-free homeowners will affect the region’s housing market in the coming years, according to a Newsday analysis of census data. Jonathan LaMantia reports in NEWSDAY that nearly 38% of Long Island homeowning households are mortgage-free, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey 1-year estimates for 2023. That compares with 35.4% in 2018.

The pattern on Long Island is similar to the national trend, with 39.8% of homeowners who own reporting they have no mortgage, according to an analysis released in late October by the National Association of Home Builders..

On Long Island, more than half of these mortgage-free homeowners are 65 or older. Owners who have paid off their mortgage stand to potentially cash in if they were to sell their homes, which have seen substantial increases in value in recent years. But housing experts told Newsday that a lack of attractive housing options, the expensive rental market and seniors’ preferences for staying in their homes all work against these mortgage-free homes hitting the market. Still, Na Zhao, principal economist at NAHB, says she doesn’t see a connection between the growing share of mortgage-free owners and national issues with limited housing inventory. That’s because the percentage of owners without a mortgage has risen steadily over the past decade even when the number of houses on the market has climbed. The biggest factor keeping people from selling their homes is the mortgage lock-in effect, she said, in which owners who have home loans with an interest rate around 3% choose not to move because of how much their housing payment would increase with a rate above 6%.

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Long Island Morning Edition is part of Your Election 2024, a special collection of programs, series, and resources from The WNET Group to illuminate election issues on-air, online, and on YouTube leading into the November 5th elections. Find more at wliw.org/yourelection2024.