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Problems plague new federal form
Alison Chi's daughter has answered one big question: where she will attend college after she graduates in June from Beacon High School.
The other big question - how much it will cost - is taking longer.
"She's decided where she wants to go," said Chi. "But until we know what the whole financial package looks like, she can't commit."
Families in the Highlands with students planning for college in the fall have been in limbo for months following the U.S. Department of Education's debut of a revised Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form, which determines eligibility for grants, loans and work-study jobs.
The agency reduced the maximum number of questions from 108 to 46 to make the online process less challenging. However, technical problems have left colleges waiting to receive the information they need to calculate how much aid they can offer, which is a vital factor for many students when selecting a school from among those that accept them. Students already in college are also waiting; families must complete the FAFSA each year.
Before Congress approved legislation in 2020 mandating the simpler FAFSA form, students could begin applying on Oct. 1. Within five days, the Education Department would send colleges the needed data.
This year, students and their parents had to wait until Dec. 31 to begin completing the FAFSA form and faced outages and glitches. The Education Department said that, once an application was submitted, it could not be corrected (such as by adding a missing signature) until late January, which was pushed back to mid-March and then to April.
Colleges began receiving data for some students on March 11, according to the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, but the process had to be stopped because the Education Department used the wrong formula to calculate financial need.
The Education Department said on Tuesday (April 9) that it has sent information for 7 million applicants to schools, states and scholarship organizations and is now processing applications within three days of submission.
Chi's daughter applied to 18 schools; some have reported receiving her FAFSA data but others are still waiting. At a recent program for students accepted to Emerson College in Boston, one of her daughter's choices, "you could hear the frustration in the voices of the people from the financial aid department," said Chi.
In February, the State University of New York (SUNY) pushed back its deadline for enrollment deposits by two weeks, to May 15, for state residents. Other colleges also have extended deadlines, said Amanda Cotchen, a guidance counselor at Haldane High School.
"A lot of admissions offices have fortunately recognized that this is putting pressure on families," she said.

'Heart' of trail to lie north of Breakneck
Officials from the Hudson Highlands Fjord Trail on April 3 expressed a willingness to limit access to its planned Cold Spring-to-Beacon connector if visitors overwhelm it and threaten the environment or local communities.
In a two-hour program, staff and consultants for HHFT, a subsidiary of the Poughkeepsie-based environmental group Scenic Hudson, outlined potential ways to reduce the impacts of the planned 7.5-mile linear park paralleling the Hudson River, Metro-North train tracks and Route 9D, a state highway.
They said the path's "heart" and focus would lie between Breakneck Ridge and Dutchess Manor, at the southern tip of the Town of Fishkill, although plans call for a trail to begin in Cold Spring.
The discussion, held at Dutchess Manor, centered on "visitation management," which John Moss, a consultant from ORCA (Operation Research Consulting Associates), said entails "balancing supply and demand. We don't want attendance to ever outpace the ability of the park or trail to support it."
He added that "we recognize that it may be necessary, in a worst-case environment, to control entries into your trailhead, into your parking lot, to manage demand."
Moss said he came to Cold Spring for firsthand research on busy weekends in 2023 and saw the crowds exiting Metro-North trains, the overflowing sidewalk trash cans, the long lines at the public restrooms on Main Street near the train tracks, and the traffic. "I completely understand what we've been up against," he said.
Along with the other HHFT representatives, Moss suggested strategies to alleviate problems, such as signs to guide visitors; bathrooms at Dockside Park, Little Stony Point and the Breakneck and Notch trailheads; a visitor center at Dutchess Manor; 600 parking spots (including 235 new spaces); and a trailhead shuttle.
"No Fjord Trail parking is intended in Cold Spring" and more parking between Cold Spring and Beacon will ensure that "it's not one big, aggregate mall parking lot in the middle of the trail corridor," Moss said. He said HHFT will manage and maintain the restrooms, shuttle operations, parking lots and other trail facilities.
Al Shacklett, also with ORCA, said that, even without the Fjord Trail, heavy tourism is expected to continue and "conditions you see today are going to get worse" outside the Cold Spring restrooms. At present, about a third of village visitors are hikers, Shacklett said. He said that, in recent years, interest in Breakneck Ridge has appeared to drop while increasing at the Washburn trail, opposite Little Stony Point, just outside the village limit.
With the Fjord Trail, he said, hikers will be steered toward picking up the trail at Breakneck, where the train stop is being upgraded. With those changes in place, Shacklett estimated that 50 percent of the hikers who now take the train to Cold Spring will instead continue to Breakneck. In that case, "we still have a surge, but the surge is much mitigated by the shift" from one station to another, he said.
Shortly after the meeting, members of a Visitation Data Committee established to help HHFT with analysis issued a statement that outlined its concerns with recent Fjord Trail materials, including a claim that visitation to Hudson Highlands State Park Preserve had increased by 7.6 percent between 2016 and 2023, although, the committee members said, the state parks department reported a 10.7 percent increase.
The five committee members, who include Nelsonville Mayor Chris Winward, argued that HHFT and its consultants had inadequately considered the effects of social media and marketing on visitation and the Highlands' proximity to population centers. "We hope that HHFT will revise their research" so that future reports can be "more reliable," the committee said.
Responding on Monday (April 8), Amy Kacala, HHFT's executive director, called the committee's reaction "premature" because its "discussion and review of the visitation projection

To observe a total eclipse in the American West in 1878, a group of female astronomers from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie made a cross-country journey to the outskirts of the fledgling city of Denver and stationed themselves atop a hill next to a Catholic hospital. Steadfast in their pleated dresses behind a cluster of telescopes, and in full view of a contingent of stunned reporters and nuns, they showed that women were just as capable of contributing to the grand march of science.
My journey from the Hudson Valley to the totality in 2024 was considerably less perilous, with the exception of some backups on the Thruway. My wife, son and I drove north to Rochester, under clear skies with the roadside willows blooming gold. We had chosen Rochester for two scientific reasons: First, it was smack in the middle of the Path of Totality, the 100-mile-wide belt stretching from Mexico to Newfoundland (the Highlands only reached about 93 percent).
Second, my wife is from Rochester, meaning we had free places to stay instead of spending $699 for a motel room that is usually $69.
We put the eclipse on our calendar two years ago. We checked in with everyone we knew in Rochester until we had secured a place to stay, a backup place to stay and a second backup. A million people descended on the Flower City, and we joined what seemed like all of them for a festival at the planetarium.
Since I had pulled my son out of school, I felt he could not return without learning something. So we learned that the last total eclipse in Rochester a century ago was hidden by clouds - which I should have recognized as foreshadowing. We learned how fast you would have to fly from Mexico to Canada to keep up with the totality (the speed of sound). And we learned how remarkable it is that our sun and moon are exactly the precise sizes and distances from the Earth to line up occasionally.
On other planets, the moons are too small or too big.
On Monday, we assembled in my uncle-in-law's backyard/field. We had telescopes and cameras and a tray of novelty cookies decorated to look like the moon covering the sun. We had everything we needed except an enormous fan to blow the clouds away.
I was disappointed, but then things started to get weird. About 20 minutes before the totality, the clouds looked less like clouds and more like William Blake's exaggerated drawings of clouds. The shadows became darker, and the clouds pulled toward us, as if the flat sky was becoming topographical.
Ten minutes later it was noticeably colder. Swarms of mosquitoes, the first of the year, appeared from nowhere. The spring peepers went from a whisper to a roar. The sky changed to a bruised mixture of black and blue that I had never seen. The streetlights came on. I tried to take photos but the camera in my phone kept trying to "fix" the image.
A thin band of sunset persisted at the bottom of the sky, in a 360-degree ring. And then, from west to east, a wave of brightness washed across the universe. It was over. The lights flickered off and the peepers faded. We hoped that the mosquitoes would also go away, but no luck with that.
Had you told me beforehand that clouds would block the totality, we might not have made the drive. But I'm glad we did. We remained stunned for several minutes. And the telescopes didn't go to waste: After the sun went down the skies became crystal clear and we were treated to dazzling views of the Pleiades, the Orion Nebula and Jupiter and its moons.
The next total eclipse over the continental U.S. won't be for 20 years, but there will be one over Sydney, Australia, four years from now on my birthday: July 22. We've marked our calendar.

Beacon building sold; last day is April 21
Richie Kaplan, the proprietor of Max's on Main, has sold the building that hosts what he contends is "Beacon's oldest bar."
Kaplan plans to close Max's, at 246 Main St., on April 21. The well-worn establishment's future is unclear; a former restaurant and bar owner from Brooklyn identified as the buyer did not immediately respond to an email or text asking about plans for the 1870 building.
Regardless, Kaplan, 71, said it's time for a change. Day and night, he scrambles with a stooped gait to bus tables and tend to customers. Soon, he will take down the whimsical wall decorations and babysit his grandchildren.
"I hear Foreigner needs a drummer," he said, with a laugh.
A wooden phone booth sits in the lobby for the upstairs apartments. The tenants must leave by mid-June, according to one resident. Only six people occupy the 20 rooms, she said, adding that some pay $500 a month.
Setting up the gear for a gig at Max's, Steve Mittelstadt said he was disappointed to hear the building has been sold. "It's a great place to come in, watch football and see people you know, but gentrification is unavoidable," he said.
"This is one of the last remaining community-based, family run gathering spots, and it's going to be hard to replace," he said. "A lot of people will sorely miss it, but we can only hope that whoever comes in keeps it the same."
During some downtime just before midnight on April 6, Kaplan and Shirley Hot, the owner of Pandorica restaurant, another mainstay on Main Street, reminisced about Joe's Irish Pub (now Momo Valley) and the crime that once plagued the city.
"We stayed open until 4 a.m. - we were crazy," said Kaplan, referring to his brother and partner, Harvey, who died last year. Max's, named for their father, opened in 2006. "There was an army of drug dealers; we escorted people to their cars at night."
Hot, who blames her hearing loss on the bands at Joe's Irish Pub, remembers when "no one wanted Beacon. It was a depressed city and now, 25 years later, we can't afford to stay. There's been so many changes and so much turnover on Main Street, it's incredible."
Max's on Main, at 246 Main St., is open through April 21 from noon to 10 p.m. Monday to Thursday, noon to 11 p.m. on Friday and Saturday and noon to 9 p.m. on Sunday. See maxsonmain.com or call 845-838-6297.

Restaurateur approved to open dispensary
Beacon restaurateur Kamel Jamal has won the city's second license to sell recreational marijuana, whose sales are increasing as more retailers open.
Jamal, who owns the Beacon Bread Company and Ziatun, was one of 101 applicants approved by the state's Cannabis Control Board on Thursday (April 11) to grow, process and distribute marijuana, and to sell buds and cannabis products at retail locations.
He applied as 463 Station Inc. a reference to the former police station he owns at 463 Main St. Last fall, he hosted a state-approved "showcase" there, a program that gave farmers and processors places to sell buds and edibles while awaiting the opening of more dispensaries.
Jamal declined to discuss his plans, saying he wants to "focus on our buildout and process." In September, when asked about his application for a license, he said it was essential to have legalized dispensaries selling products from state-approved growers. "If money can be counterfeited, they can also counterfeit cannabis packaging," he said.
The Cannabis Control Board awarded Beacon's first cannabis license in February to Aaron Sanders and Skyla Schreter, who own LotusWorks at 261 Main St. Their microbusiness permit allows the couple to grow cannabis, process the trimmings into distillates and rosins, and sell buds, extracts and edibles.
LotusWorks plans to plant its first crop in the spring of 2025. In the meantime, the couple said it will source buds, rosins and distillates, as well as joints and edibles such as gummies, from other farms and processors.
They will launch the business at The Yard in Beacon on April 20, an annual, unofficial holiday in cannabis culture. The event, from 2 to 9 p.m., will include complimentary joints, artwork, live music and yoga.
Grant McCabe, who owns The Leaf, a Main Street shop that sells cannabidiol and hemp products, has also applied for a license. Another company, Pleasant View Harvest in Brewster, has applied for a microbusiness license to sell products from 137 Main St. in Cold Spring.
Overall, the Cannabis Control Board on Thursday approved licenses for 35 dispensaries, 25 growers, 22 microbusinesses, 11 distributors and eight processors.
High Moon LLC, a company based in Carmel, was among the recipients of a microbusiness license. That typically allows an applicant to grow, process and sell cannabis products at retail, but High Moon's license does not include a retail component.
The board also approved a provisional retail dispensary license for Serenity Greens LLC, based in Newburgh.
Sales from the state's 103 operating retail dispensaries have totaled $102 million since Jan. 1, said John Kagla, director of policy for the Office of Cannabis Management.
Weekly sales exceeded $9 million for the first time in March and are on pace to exceed $10 million this month, he said. Total sales should exceed last year's $160 million by June.

Cold Spring district says no to set rate
Will Haldane always be an option for Garrison graduates?
That's the big question underlying a dispute over the terms of the tuition agreement between the school districts.
Garrison educates students through the eighth grade, after which they enroll at Haldane, O'Neill in Highland Falls, Putnam Valley or a private high school. Garrison pays about $17,000 in tuition for each student who attends a public school and has reached five-year agreements with O'Neill, Putnam Valley and Haldane. But Haldane reserved the right to negotiate the tuition for incoming ninth graders each year.
"We're looking for budget consistency and long-term planning," said Kent Schacht, the Garrison board member who pleaded the district's case at Haldane's board meeting on Tuesday (April 9).
Haldane has balked at agreeing to the price for ninth graders because it wants to "keep open the option of negotiating the tuition rate should something unforeseen occur," said Peggy Clements, president of the Haldane board.
Speaking at the Garrison school board meeting on Wednesday, Schacht proposed asking for a deal that sets the price for ninth graders but allows Haldane to renegotiate with two years' notice.
The uncertainty of an annual tuition negotiation raises the question of whether Haldane High School will remain an option for eighth graders, said Carl Albano, Garrison's interim superintendent. "We can't guarantee them Haldane because we don't have a negotiated rate."
He noted that Garrison seventh graders don't yet have Haldane as an option because the districts haven't agreed on a rate for the ninth graders enrolling at Haldane in 2025. That uncertainty isn't an issue for O'Neill or Putnam Valley because each agreed to a five-year schedule for all students that raises the rate annually at 2 percent or the rate of inflation, whichever is less. O'Neill and Haldane reached their agreements in 2022 and Putnam Valley in 2023.
According to Joseph Jimick, the Garrison business administrator, the district paid tuition for 84 students for the current school year, including 47 at Haldane, 33 at O'Neill and four at Putnam Valley. Next year, it expects to pay for 95 high school students, including 51 at Haldane, 27 at O'Neill and 17 at Putnam Valley.
For 2023-24, the district paid $16,825 per student at all three high schools.
The dispute dates to the spring of 2022, when Haldane wanted to charge Garrison $21,500 per student based on the "Seneca Falls formula," named for the district involved in a lawsuit that established the formula in 1949. Haldane had been charging Garrison about $14,000 a year.
Garrison, facing a deficit that would require a 6.6 percent tax increase, said it couldn't afford that rate, and Haldane agreed to charge $16,500 for 2022-23 as negotiations continued.
"Haldane has worked to find a compromise that recognizes the challenges that Garrison is experiencing," said Clements, the Haldane board president. But, she added, "We think an education at Haldane is worth the non-resident tuition rate, which the state has calculated for Haldane as $18,982."
Haldane board members say the district is committed to accepting Garrison students, as it has for decades. "There is a long history and a relationship," said Clements, who noted that districts are intertwined in many ways, such as with shared middle school sports teams and classes for students with disabilities.
The Garrison board on Wednesday adopted a proposed $13.3 million budget for 2024-25 with a 4.44 percent tax increase that matches the state cap calculated for the district. The budget will be on the ballot on May 21.