South Huntington transportation committee recommends moving sixth grade to Memorial, opening Silas Wood as pre-K; proposes multi‑year bus purchase plan

The South Huntington Union Free School District's transportation committee recommended that the district move sixth‑grade students to the Memorial School building and convert Silas Wood into a pre‑K center, while pursuing a three‑ to five‑year plan to expand the district-owned bus fleet and reduce reliance on private vendors.

The recommendation followed a transportation committee presentation to the Board of Education in which Superintendent for Business Mike Conway and Walt Whitman High School Principal Dr. John Murphy summarized staffing, equipment and run counts, and engineers from R and M Engineering presented a traffic study assessing two scenarios: shifting sixth graders to Memorial and centralizing pre‑K programs at Silas Wood.

The study, presented by traffic engineer Kian Cody of R and M Engineering, modeled intersections along Pigeon Hill Road and nearby streets and concluded the two proposed scenarios would produce only “minor impacts” on roadway levels of service. Cody said the analysis showed “there's going to be minor impacts in both scenarios,” naming the library driveway and one Silas‑area intersection as spots with…