Farmingdale students' thank you cards delivered to Westchester hospital staff who treated bus crash victims

Farmingdale's school superintendent thanked the medical staff of a Westchester County hospital Monday, hand-delivering thank you cards, letters and drawings made by elementary school children for caregivers after the crash of a bus upstate carrying marching band members and supporters.

The doctors, nurses and support staff of Westchester Medical Center Health Network's Maria Fareri Children's Hospital in Valhalla and other area health facilities “were there to help our students not only on the day of the crash but in the weeks that followed,” Superintendent Paul Defendini said in an interview. “We believed as a school system that it was important to make sure all the people who helped us along the way see the importance of their work and how their work impacts those people who are touched by it.”

Beaming stick-figure nurses, puppies and hearts featured prominently in some of the more than a thousand thank-yous made by district elementary schoolers.

Defendini was joined in Westchester by Farmingdale High School Principal Jed Herman and two district nurses, Joanne Kelly and Denise Specht. Specht was aboard one of the buses making the trip to a Greeley, Pennsylvania, camp at the time of the Sept. 21 crash; Kelly was already at the camp but doubled back to the crash scene. The two frequently visited injured students and their families in the weeks afterward, Defendini said.

The crash injured dozens of high school marching band members and killed two adults when the rented charter bus ran through a cable barrier on Interstate 84 in the Orange County town of Wawayanda and tumbled down an embankment. Band director Gina Pellettiere, 43, and longtime chaperone Beatrice Ferrari, 77, were killed. The bus driver was ejected from the vehicle but survived.

On Oct. 6, the last injured student left hospital care. But victims — some of whom suffered fractured bones and other internal injuries — face a long recovery that has made in-person schooling difficult. “All our kids are receiving an education,” Defendini said, although, he added, some band members attend class part-time and others are doing all their schooling from home. Almost all who returned to in-person schooling are still in the marching band, he said.

District officials plan two more thank-you events later this month for upstate responders and local supporters. 

Dr. Michael Gewitz, Maria Fareri’s physician-in-chief, coordinated the hospital’s disaster response after the crash. Even for a Level 1 Pediatric Trauma Center like Maria Fareri, the task was “monumental,” Gewitz recalled in an interview.

“It was all hands on deck," he said. "That is what we are trained and ready to do.”

Gewitz and his colleagues treat thousands of children every year. Even so, he said, they don’t often get the sort of thanks bestowed by Defendini and the Farmingdale students.

“This was a circumstance where we knew we had an impact. They were very warm and generous in reminding us of the impact we had.”

Some of the children wrote brief thank you notes, he said. Some traced their hands. All of them, he said, “will adorn our walls.”