Under financial pressure on all sides, the Oak Bluffs School will cut three faculty positions, slash general supplies and professional development funds and dip into school choice savings to help pay for a town budget shortfall, it was decided this week.

And while the school is doing its share to help the town, the town will not return the favor, and is set to pocket nearly $3,000 in compensation for the use of the school last week as a briefing area by the White House and media center for the press corps during the presidential visit.

Oak Bluffs School principal Laury Binney will be showing a short film and speaking about his recent travels to Brazil on Tuesday, Oct. 21 at 7 p.m. It is free and open to all.

Mr. Binney, who took an unpaid sabbatical last year, and his wife Marcy, a reading teacher, spent six months visiting elementary schools in Brazil in an effort to gain insights into addressing the needs of Brazilian-born students on the Vineyard. The talk takes place at the Oak Bluffs School.

A secretary at the Oak Bluffs School has been charged with embezzling more than $15,000 from a school account by forging the principal’s name on several checks and then keeping the money.

Susan T. Peters, 59, of Oak Bluffs, was summonsed last week on charges of larceny by a single scheme over $250, forgery of checks, uttering false checks and larceny over $250.

Portrait of Close Companions, As Drawn at Oak Bluffs School

By C.K. WOLFSON

"If you can imagine it, you can dream it, if you can dream it,
you can become it," wrote Kevin Hayes (K.J.) Johnson in his Oak
Bluffs School 2001 yearbook.

A federal civil rights investigation of the Oak Bluffs and Tisbury
schools has cited both for failing to meet the instructional needs of
their growing population of Brazilian students.

The investigation was triggered by a parent complaint in November
which alleged that the schools' lack of trained teachers,
interpreters and appropriate materials was shortchanging Brazilian
students.