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Mostly Cloudy Their day at the helm of Valley Stream
Sixth-grade pair win Mayor for a Day contest
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While most children were probably still in bed at 9 a.m. last Friday, with a day off from school, Marken Suaza and Kayla Gonsalves were arriving at Village Hall for a special day.
The two sixth-graders won the village’s Mayor for a Day essay contest, and spent the morning traveling around Valley Stream with Mayor Ed Fare and Board of Trustees assistant Barbara DeGrace. “This is a wonderful experience for the kids,” DeGrace said. “This is a memory that they’ll take away, that they had this hands-on experience.”
The village received more than 100 essays from sixth-graders offering their answers to the question, “What does the mayor do?” Fare chose the winners, saying that Kayla’s and Marken’s essays stood out. Marken, who attends the James A. Dever School, highlighted the different facets of the mayor’s job, while Kayla, a student at the Robert W. Carbonaro School, wrote assertively about the electoral process. “I remember that last line, that she wants to be mayor for a day,” Fare said.
Most children don’t realize how extensive the village’s operations are, he added, and he wanted to give the pair at least a taste of that. “They’re coming out in the field and seeing firsthand what the operation does,” he said. “We can’t come close to hitting every department.”
Hitting the road
After getting acquainted with one another at Village Hall, the four hopped into a silver Ford Crown Victoria — normally driven by Village Clerk Bob Barra — and headed off to the Public Works yard on Arlington Avenue. On the way there, Fare talked about the Sanitation Department and how every garbage truck gets weighed after it picks up trash. That’s so the village can accurately pay its hauling company, Jamaica Ash, which takes the compacted trash away.
Fare told Marken and Kayla to think about how much garbage they throw away in a day, then multiply that by 39,000 — the population of Valley Stream. Arriving at the Sanitation Department shortly after 9:30 a.m., the honorary mayors were greeted by dozens of workers in bright orange “Valley Stream Sanitation” sweatshirts.
