Mr. Vaccaro, an esteemed teacher of FMS who has taught for 30 years, announced this year his decision to retire from Hastings; he will be pursuing a new opportunity as a teacher in a private school.

Although he still enjoys teaching at Hastings, the decision was ultimately what was best for his family. During his 30 year tenure at FMS, Mr. Vaccaro taught Earth Science for 25 years and built for himself a reputation as a teacher who is deeply passionate about helping students love science as much as he does. He is also known, of course, for his infamous rendition of “I Want to Rock,” which he sings every year while standing on a table or chair and playing an air guitar solo. Although he has always been excited about teaching the Kepler System or how Igneous rocks form, it is the students that Mr. Vaccaro will remember most. In fact, he estimated that over his career, he has taught 2,200 students in the Hastings district.

Some of his proudest moments have come when students return years later to tell him that he instilled in them a love for science and that they’re now studying science in college. In fact, one of his former students now teaches Earth Science at West Point; Mr. Vaccaro was told by this student that it had been his teaching that “planted the seed early.”

For Mr. Vaccaro, becoming a high school teacher and coach was the result of an unexpected opportunity at SUNY Albany, where he went to college. Although Mr. Vaccaro wasn’t sure exactly what he wanted to do professionally after college, he did know “that the last thing I wanted to do was become a baker.” His dad was a baker, which meant that during his childhood, Mr. Vaccaro would have to wake up at 4:00am or earlier on holiday breaks to prepare cakes and, most notably, pumpkin pies on Thanksgiving. During his sophomore year at SUNY Albany, Mr. Vaccaro was taking a football coaching class that included some kind of work study outside of the classroom, so he volunteered to coach JV football at Albany High School. He fell in love with coaching and decided that he wanted to become a teacher. Teaching in the sciences was a natural fit as he was majoring in biology.

In his professional career, coaching and teaching have always been intertwined. He believes the “same rules apply; you need to have classroom management or field management, you have to be organized, and you have to have a passion.” He notes that classroom management is especially important for middle school. In fact, “The first three rules of middle school teaching are classroom management, classroom management, and classroom management.”

His impact on students is obvious both on the field and in the classroom as well; Luca Cobucci, who played football when Mr. Vaccaro was a football coach at Hastings, said, “Coach Vaccaro influenced me in the way that he gave me the confidence to believe in myself at a young age and was always incredibly positive. He encouraged us to be the best we could be. He was a great coach and teacher as he was always available to us and wanted us to be the best version of ourselves.”

Mr. Vaccaro also likes to treat the Regents “like a football game,” because the test gives him and the students a goal to aim toward, and he takes great pride in having his students well prepared.

Besides Earth Science, Mr. Vaccaro has also taught three variations of eighth grade science. When he first started teaching at FMS, he taught Introductory Physical Science and then, in the late nineties, moved on to teaching Earth, Energy, and Matter. In the early 2000s he transitioned to Math, Science, and Technology, which ended around five years ago, and now he teaches just Earth Science, as every eighth grader has to accelerate into the Earth Science class. Having seen the entire science program progress and develop into what it is now, Mr. Vaccaro notes that his favorite class has always been Earth Science, but one of the most memorable classes that he taught was the Introductory Physical Science (IPS) class in his early years at Hastings.

“[IPS was] a great class. It was very inquiry-based, a lot of hands-on [work], and we finished up the year with a thing called the sludge test,” in which students were expected to separate a mixture of five or six components (water, rubbing alcohol, sand, salt, etc.) and identify each one in the span of around three weeks. For Mr. Vaccaro, the sludge test was more than just an experiment to be rushed through or a scribbled lab report for a grade that would be quickly forgotten; the sludge test was one of the most memorable parts of Mr. Vaccaro’s career and one of the highlights of IPS for a student, as “it was real; it wasn’t just paper and pencil—[the students] actually had to apply what they had learned during the year to do this hands-on thing. It was more real-world. From an academic point of view, the sludge test was probably one of the best things I was involved with as a teacher.”

Mr. Vaccaro’s favorite memories from his time at Hastings of course include “I Want to Rock”; recently, he has, with the help of his classes, made his rendition into a video. This year, he even “got on the table and did my guitar solo; I thought it was hilarious.”

Zoe Lohrasbi, a current student of Mr. Vaccaro, said, “Mr. Vaccaro is honestly the best science teacher I’ve ever had! He loves what he does and he’s entertaining. One of my fondest memories of him was when we sang ‘I Want to Rock,’ and he jumped on the table and played the air guitar. Mr. Vaccaro makes the funniest jokes and is such a wonderful teacher!”

These moments of laughter are really important to Mr. Vaccaro, as he understands that “no one is going to remember all of the stuff they learned in school, but yelling ‘nothing affects half life’ and the ‘I want to rock’ song will make kids ten, fifteen years from now say ‘Oh, I remember that!’”

The Buzzer would like to thank Mr. Vacarro for being such an incredible, passionate teacher and coach who has inspired so many with his kindness and love of science.

By Kaylee Oppenheimer

But to us, Hastings residents, energy is a switch, water is a faucet, and trash cans are beautifully convenient swallowers of waste which seamlessly make our garbage disappear. Unfortunately, we students rarely get the full lowdown on how these luxuries work. Who can blame us for our ignorance? The aristocrats of Versailles did not see the wretched in the city streets. Neither do we.

A clear example of an important blindspot is our trash and what happens to it. According to the Hastings municipal website, our garbage is taken to Wheelabrator’s waste to energy plant in Peekskill, where it is incinerated to provide energy for the power grid. Wheelabrator Westchester, as it is known, processes 2,250 tons of garbage a day. It burns enough trash to power 63,600 homes, but at an enormous cost. According to a document published by the Board of Trustees of the Village of Hastings-on-Hudson, Wheelabrator Westchester released 577 million pounds of carbon dioxide in 2016. A passenger vehicle would have to circumnavigate the earth 26,016 times to match Wheelabrator’s 2016 CO₂ emissions. In that same year, Wheelabrator also emitted 131,000 pounds of carbon monoxide, 270,000 pounds of sulfur dioxide, and more than 2 million pounds of nitrogen oxide. The plant is located on John Walsh Boulevard in Peekskill, about a mile from the town’s residential area.

What does this mean for the residents of Peekskill? According to health and environmental departments from the governments of the United States and Australia, SO₂ and NO both cause irritation of the respiratory system and lead to asthma and other illnesses of the airways. Indeed, the Hastings Village Board of Trustees confirms that communities living around the plant have higher rates of asthma. Of course, other negative health effects in Peekskill are going unreported. It is hard to be certain about the specifics, but health data from around the world suggests that Peekskill residents suffer gruesome side-effects. A study reported by the United States National Institute of Biological Health found that those living within a 7.5 km radius of municipal waste incinerators in England, Scotland, and Wales had a significantly higher chance of developing cancer of the stomach, colon, liver, and lung. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry studied a population living near a waste incinerator in western North Carolina and found that “[...m]embers of the population close to the incinerator were almost nine times more likely to report recurrent wheezing or cough, and they were almost twice as likely as those living further from the site to report respiratory symptoms (after adjustment for smoking, asthma, and environmental concern).”

Admittedly, the Wheelabrator plant is among some of the better waste-to-energy plants (at least according to its website). It takes steps to reduce the amount of pollutants released and to recycle some waste rather than incinerate it. But the very nature of its work spells out danger for the health of Peekskill citizens.

To find out why Peekskill boasts a waste incinerator plant and Hastings does not, one need look no further than Census data. Hastings-on-Hudson is 88.1% white. Peekskill, on the other hand, consists mostly of people of color: 77% of the town’s people are black or Hispanic or Latinx. The average annual income of a Hastings household is 139,118 dollars, while Peekskill households earn an average of 54,494 dollars. Only 27.4% of Peekskill adults over 25 have a bachelor’s degree, but 73.5% of Hastings adults over 25 have graduated college. The fact is that Hastings, like so many other towns in Westchester, which are wealthier and have more power than Peekskill, hold the authority to refuse to share in the burden of waste. Could Hastings, a self-declared environmentally-conscious and diversity-oriented town, be a perpetrator of environmental racism? Environmental racism is the purposeful targeting of communities of color for facilities with toxic pollutants. By that definition, the Hastings-Peekskill relationship is a textbook case of environmental racism.

Now I am not suggesting we start piling our trash onto Reynolds and start our own incineration plant. No community, privileged or otherwise, should have to deal with the scourge of toxic pollutants. But it is our responsibility to do our part. 45% of Wheelabrator’s trash, including food scraps, is recyclable. Two of the best things we as teenagers can do is recycle our trash and be mindful of our trash output. Donate old clothes and shoes. Encourage your family to collect and then recycle plastic bags at Foodtown (it’s free). Urge them also to put food scraps into industrial compost. Take food waste down to the Department of Public Works by the river and put it in the big green compost bins. If thirteen dollars is too much for a lightweight, sealable compost bin (for sale at the James Harmon Community Center), buy an orange Home Depot bucket for less than five dollars. Sets of twenty-five six-gallon compostable food waste bags sell at the community center for five dollars apiece. And even though we are forbidden from entering the school right now, we should still formulate ideas on how to reduce our waste as Hastings High School students: Put tea or seltzer or just plain water in a metal bottle instead of buying drinks. Bring peanuts or crackers to school in tins rather than buying bag after bag of potato chips. Pack a sandwich in a tin container once or twice a week instead of always buying and then throwing out plates of food. The key is to be conscious of your trash output.

While we often advocate on behalf of the environment as a vague and abstract concept, it is worth remembering that there are real, concrete environmental problems impacting our fellow Americans just a few miles away. The small steps described above are simple but effective. The lighter your trash bags, the lighter your conscience. And the less garbage incinerated in Peekskill?. Who knows? You might stop a cancer case and improve public health. That’s worth something, right?

By Seamus Pugh