A Smithtown East Student's Big Year of Writing and Parks
A tenth grader from Smithtown High School East just picked up a countywide honor tied to Suffolk's youth recognition program, the one that asks teens to spend real time exploring their community and building a personal project from the ground up.
The requirements are not small. He walked through and wrote about fifteen different Suffolk County parks and put in more than a hundred hours on his own project, which turned out to be two full length novels running past 350 pages combined. He is hoping to see them published before the year is out. Of everyone in his legislative district, he was the only student chosen for the award this cycle, as Patch reported.
Fifteen parks in one project is a good reminder of how much green space sits within a short drive around here. If you are curious what the park access and general feel of different Smithtown pockets look like before you commit to a street, the town guide over at /towns/ is a good place to start.