Radio Chatskill

The start of a new school year always brings lots of planning, excitement, and maybe a few nerves. For Rockland Central School District students, families, and staff, this year marks an even bigger fresh start after Livingston Manor and Roscoe Central school districts merged into one unified school district in 2024.

Radio Catskill’s Kimberly Izar spoke with Superintendent John Evans of Rockland Central School District about what students and families should know about the upcoming school year.

 Festus, presented by the interdisciplinary ensemble Strike Anywhere Performance Ensemble, invites participants to play games, solve puzzles, and share stories—all of which are transformed into live music, movement, and theater in real time.

Strike Anywhere’s Leece Walker and Ralph Sturm spoke with Radio Catskill about what audiences can expect. “We’re going to invite folks to join us in some art making,” said Walker. “We’ll be playing games, doing writing, drawing, cutting paper, and possibly even making shadow puppets. Anything that the audience creates becomes fodder for us to sound paint with during the show.”

Sound painting, explained Walker, is a universal sign language for live composition. “I’ll be signing to performers—dancers, musicians, and actors—who respond in improvisation according to the signs. I can pump up the volume, ask an actor to improvise as a newscaster, or go quietly, and the performers react immediately.”

Sturm, who will be among the performers responding to these live instructions, described the process as “magical.” He said, “You have to be in the moment, eyes and ears open, because you don’t know what the sound painter will sign next or how others will respond. It’s very direct and improvisational, but not necessarily comedic—it can be abstract or poignant.”

Festus is a departure from Strike Anywhere’s previous community-based projects, Walker explained. “In the past, we’ve spent weeks engaging communities to gather content for shows. This is fast-paced—a flash content gathering style where audience contributions are woven directly into the performance on the spot. This is development in action, happening here for the first time at NACL.”

Audience members will have the opportunity to create shadow puppets in response to prompts, which will immediately be incorporated into the live performance.

Strike Anywhere, founded in 1997, has evolved from director-driven productions to deeply community-focused work. “About 10 or 12 years in, we started working directly with communities, deriving the content of the show from their experiences rather than from the director’s brain,” Walker said. Past projects have tackled topical issues like fracking, engaging local residents in the creative process and taking the resulting performances to other communities and even international venues.

Sturm emphasized the ongoing importance of community engagement. “Wherever we go, we conduct new interviews to understand what’s happening in that community. The performance is tailored, timely, and can spark dialogue and action even after the show ends.”

Festus will be performed at 7:30 p.m. this Saturday at NACL. For more information on the ensemble and the event, visit strikeanywhere.info and nacl.org.

The Village of Liberty approved a local law on Aug. 21 to prohibit camping or sleeping in Village parks, sideways, and other public areas. The local ordinance came with mixed input from community members. Some residents said the law was necessary for tighter public safety regulations, while others said the law criminalized homeless residents.

Radio Catskill’s Kimberly Izar was at the public hearing held right before the full Village Board passed the local law and brings us this report.

Environmental advocates and farmers in New York state are preparing to organize to stop the construction of the Constitution Pipeline that would bring fracked gas from Central Pennsylvania into New York and parts of New England.

They’ve been here before, winning a long fought legal battle in the 2010s. But with the Trump administration’s  forceful intervention in state's energy sources, the Hochul administration may be willing to concede to the construction of the pipeline.

Radio Catskill’s Genevieve Hartnett spoke with Anne Marie Garti, attorney and environmental activist about the suspicious ways this pipeline is being moved to construction and the widespread rejection to the pipeline among land owners in Upstate New York.

Pennsylvania lawmakers blew past the state’s June 30 deadline to pass a budget, and as the impasse stretches into late August, local leaders in Northeast Pennsylvania are bracing for possible impacts.

“The Pennsylvania state budget has a legal deadline of end of June, early July,” said Liam Mayo, news editor of The River Reporter. “And given that it’s almost September now, that budget or that deadline has very clearly come and gone and Pennsylvania does not yet have a finalized budget.”

Without a budget, state payments to local agencies are on hold. “The budget is what authorizes the state to sort of spend the money that it has. And without a budget agreement in place, the state can’t send out any of that money,” Mayo explained.

The major sticking point is transit funding. “Both Republicans and Democrats want to increase the amount of funding that goes to public transit in Pennsylvania, but there’s sort of disagreements on where that funding could come from,” Mayo said. “Either way you cut it, that’s leaving a hole in the budget somewhere, and there’s still this disagreement on where that hole should be.”

So far, impacts in Wayne and Pike have been limited. “In general, the people we talked to said that they either haven’t sort of felt these missed payments yet or they have enough money in reserve to weather a couple of missed payments or both,” Mayo reported.

Pike County Commissioner Matt Osterberg told The River Reporter there had been concern that the Carbon Monroe Pike Drug and Alcohol Commission could be unable to provide services, but opioid settlement funds have been used to bridge the gap. Still, Osterberg said, “This is basically politics and I think it’s a shame that political disagreements can cause such havoc on the local level. This is always disruptive to an entire community when they do this.”

Wallenpaupack Area School District Superintendent Keith Ganassi told The River Reporter the district “has not been negatively affected at this time,” noting that local property tax revenues will see the district through the delay.

Michelle Young, director of the Wayne County Family Center, told The River Reporter her agency has weathered past budget stalemates without shutting down. “Regardless, I’ll rest easier when the budget is passed and funding is released for all the schools and vital programs that need this money,” she added.

County officials are watching closely. “Everybody is preparing to potentially make some changes in services or preparing to shift some money around to make sure that services are not disrupted,” Mayo said. “But as of right now, they’re still looking at, okay, we may need to do this in a couple of weeks — not we are needing to do this on a large scale at this moment in time.”

Wayne County Clerk Andrew Seder told The River Reporter department heads have been put on notice about the budget delay but have not yet been asked to cut services. “If the budget impasse goes on a couple more weeks, the county will have to talk about what steps it could take to weather the storm,” Seder said.

At the state level, Sen. Lisa Baker, who represents Wayne and Pike counties, defended the Senate Republican proposal to prioritize roadwork. In a recent statement, she said the plan “recognizes the need for mass transit funding, but not at the expense of the rest of the Commonwealth. The plan turns a necessary corner in the right direction by prioritizing equity in funding, ensuring small communities in rural areas also receive resources.”

Mayo said the uncertainty itself is weighing on local communities: “Even though people might not be feeling direct immediate impacts, just the idea that this is something people need to prepare for is something that’s weighing on people’s minds in a way that it wouldn’t necessarily need to if politicians at the state level could find more easy agreement.”

You can read Liam Mayo’s full reporting on the state budget impasse at riverreporter.com
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When Phoebe Legere describes her art, she doesn’t talk only about notes, instruments, or performance. She talks about floating pianos, recycled costumes dredged from Venetian canals, and children’s sneakers that make music with every step.

The visionary singer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist — who's been compared to everyone from Beethoven to Edith Piaf — has always blurred the lines between music, theater, and activism. On August 31, she brings it all together with the premiere of her new film The Gender Symphony at the Phoenicia Playhouse.

“I was the director of the film. I’m in the film. I designed all of the costumes from junk that I found floating in the canals of Venice,” Legere said. “I also did the animation for the film. It’s called The Gender Symphony and it is about a man and a woman suddenly magically switching places.”

The project reflects her lifelong fascination with the differences — and striking similarities — between men and women. “It is the basis of almost all of art and music. And of course, it is the engine for love, the greatest of human activities,” she said.

Legere describes her style as eco-magic — art that reuses and reinvents, turning the discarded into something visionary. That philosophy flows through the film’s theme song, Two Pianos, released as a single last week. Inspired by the sinking of the Titanic, where two grand pianos were seen floating among icebergs and wreckage, Legere transformed the image into a metaphor for art’s survival in the face of tragedy.

“Art persists in the greatest tragedy, in the greatest confusion. Art does not die,” she said.

Her work is never just about performance. As executive director of the Foundation for New American Art, Legere helps bring free music and art education to children in low-income communities across New York City and Poughkeepsie. That work even inspired one of her inventions: the “Sneakers of Samothraki,” musical shoes that create rhythm through tiny movements of the foot. Originally designed to encourage children with disabilities to walk again, the sneakers now feature in her compositions — including Two Pianos.

The film is already making waves abroad, winning 19 international festival prizes. Meanwhile, the single is gaining traction on Spotify playlists in France, Haiti, Belgium, and Quebec. But Legere is quick to connect her success to a bigger purpose.

“We are living in an extraordinary political moment,” she said. “But I don’t believe in despair. What I believe in is creativity, and I believe that we can sing our way forward together.”

Her message is simple, but radical: “Creativity and kindness are the most radical form of power.”

The Gender Symphony premieres Sunday, August 31, at the Phoenicia Playhouse.

The Delaware River Watershed is under threat. Delaware Riverkeeper Network released a press statement on July 16 that vowed a Pledge of Resistance and Protection against increasing efforts by pro-fracking interests working with both local and federal governmental officials to overturn the Delaware River Basin Commission’s (DRBC) fracking ban in the watershed alongside other attacks against the DRBC. 

Radio Catskill’s Julia Kim spoke with Delaware Riverkeeper Network Deputy Director Tracy Carluccio and Catskill Mountainkeeper Environmental Justice Coordinator Taylor Jaffe on the risks that fracking poses to the environment, the environmental burdens that marginalized communities have disproportionately faced and what local organizations are doing to challenge the political shift towards fracking. 

Since the correctional officers strike ended in late February, NYS prisons have yet to fully recover. During the three weeks of the unsanctioned strike, inmates found themselves confined to their cells for almost the entire day, and virtually all programs — from visitation and recreation to religious services and educational classes — were canceled. And now six months post-strike, prisons remain severely unsteady, with many of these programs still canceled or only just beginning to restart amid staffing shortages. 

Radio Catskill’s Julia Kim had the chance to speak with Thomas Gant of the decarceration nonprofit Center for Community Alternatives; Melanie Bishop, a public school teacher and the mother of an incarcerated son in New York; and Max Kenner, Executive Director for the in-prison college program Bard Prison Initiative on what new challenges incarcerated individuals and their loved ones are facing on-the-ground and how post-strike conditions have come to expose preexisting issues inside NYS prisons. 

The NYSERDA is cutting over ⅔ of the budget for EmPower+ — the state program that has helped low- and moderate-income households install energy efficiency upgrades to their homes that lower electric bills and use cleaner energy. Currently, over a million families in New York cannot afford to pay their energy bills, and participation in EmPower+ had only been growing every year when the NYSERDA chose to scale the program back. 

Radio Catskill’s Julia Kim had the chance to speak with Eric Walker, Energy Justice Senior Policy Manager for WE ACT for Environmental Justice, on what these steep cuts will look like on-the-ground and how they will exacerbate existing racial and class disparities in clean energy access and affordability. WE ACT is a community-based organization that was founded in Harlem back in 1988 with the specific aim of advocating for low-income communities and communities of color in the creation of environmental policy. 

Here’s Eric…