Welcome Back for 2024- 2025!

Dear North Rockland Families,

I hope that you, like me, were able to soak in the joy of our students’ return to school this week. It was wonderful to see the excitement in childrens’ eyes and hear it in their voices as they returned to our buildings, seeing old friends and meeting new ones. Their energy was matched by our faculty and staff, who had their buildings and classrooms ready for the first day.

We know that the ongoing construction and the resulting changes to bussing and traffic patterns have made drop off and pick up more stressful than usual, and these changes have made it difficult to establish routines. With earlier start times, later pickups, and more time in vehicles, we understand this first week may have been more of an inconvenience than previous school openings.

I would like to thank you for your patience, flexibility, and support during the start of the 2024-25 school year. We are grateful for your understanding as we work through these adjustments and inconveniences together. Thanks to the cooperation and positive spirit, between parents, staff, students and our local police departments we navigated the traffic challenges we faced and made the best out of what could have been a much worse situation. We anticipate improvements in delays as we continue our work with staff and local officials to revise our plans as needed for efficiency and safety.

Our transportation department will be working all weekend to answer your questions, and to make the route adjustments necessary due to change of address information that has been received this week.

Requests for house stops or adjustments to bus stop areas will be reviewed after all change of address adjustments have been made. School officials will determine if these requests are viable with the health and safety of our students at the forefront of these decisions.

It is important to remember that an increase in house stops adds to the time our students spend on their buses and can add to congestion and traffic delays. If you are still experiencing any issues, need to provide change of address information, or would like to make other requests please contact the transportation department directly by emailing transportation@northrockland.org. Your patience is appreciated as our team works hard to answer all of your questions and concerns.

In closing, I also want to take a moment to recognize our community’s grandparents, because Saturday is National Grandparents Day. Grandparents play such an important role in so many childrens’ lives, especially here in our community. Personally, I know that I would not be where I am today without the love and support my grandparents provided. Thank you Grandparents for all you do for our community and its children!

-Dr. Kris Felicello

Say cheese! Enjoy a few First Day photos, contributed by parents from around the district. If the smiles are any indication, it's going to be an outstanding year!

One of the things that makes the North Rockland Central School District such a special place are the number of students who return home to teach after attending our schools. Here's a brief look at just a few of those people. We'll introduce you to even more of them as the year goes on!

Our Red Raider JV and Varsity football teams joined state champion team Somers High School for a collaborative joint practice to be exposed to a high-performance team that has a ton of talent. Our Raiders played great and Somers made them feel right at home. Somers is not only excellent on the field, but displayed great sportsmanship and our Raiders left feeling better than they were yesterday.

Have you seen our Red Raiders on lohud's elite watchlist? Here are the players that were mentioned:

Girls Soccer

Giavonna Orfini, F

Kerry Finnerty, GK

Gabriella Cabrera, MF/F

Sadie Essick, MF

Football

Jaquan Johnson (CB/RB)

Javon Lawrence (CB/WR) Super 11

Boys Soccer

Cross Country

Gabby Castro

Daniel Affoumani

Claudel Chery

Devon Piccone

Ryan Tuohy

Field Hockey

Olivia Castaldo, MF

North Rockland Athletics wanted to recognize our fall senior student-athletes on their last first day of high school! We wish you luck this school year and this season. Let's go Raiders!

School lunch information is available on the Food Services section of our website. There you will be able to find school lunch menus, lunch program information and nutrition resources. Please remember we are able to provide our community with the free breakfast and lunch programs because of the information generated in our lunch forms program. Please be sure to complete your application each school year. We need your help to access these and other important funding resources which are linked to our free and reduced lunch program counts.