Today was a Zoom meeting with 19 people on line.
PRE-MEETING NOTES:
Our speakers, Amy and Beth, were on early and were part of the discussions.
Gail Micca invited Amy and Beth and their spouses to our cornhole event this evening.
Beth said that her Dad was a Rotarian in Binghamton, NY for many years. They participated in many events.
GUESTS:
Just us today along with our speakers.
OPENING:
President Gail Micca started the meeting at 7:30 A.M.
Chuck Ehninger gave a very nice invocation.
Ron Coleman led us in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag of the U.S. We really were in sync today.
Marlene Heller led us in the recitation of the Four-way Test, and added “Is it Fun?”
CELEBRATIONS:
Pres. Gail displayed the list of October member celebration events. The list is shown below.
AWRC HOLIDAY PARTY:
Pres. Gail said that we are holding our annual Christmas party at Twin Lakes C.C. The date is Friday, Dec. 2nd. Registration will be ready soon.
We need volunteers to work on this event’s planning.
SNACKPACKING IS BACK:
Our first snack packing event of this academic year at Parkland H.S. was last Wednesday. We had 8 volunteers including some Interact students. Gail promoted the Rotary Youth Exchange program to the Interactors. They created 240 packs, but they were smaller this time. The contents costs keep going up, as does the need.
The Northwestern Snackpacking is today.
Herb Klotz and Dianna Dunn are chairing these efforts now.
GREEN THUMB GARDEN:
Pres. Gail said the garden will have its clean-up day on October 30.
CASINO NIGHT:
There will be a Zoom meeting next week at 7 PM to gather all ideas for the next Casino Night event. Please participate.
CHAMBER OF COMMERCE EVENTS:
- Conversations over Cornhole- October 19- Rotary
- Halloween Mixer by Delta Hotels – October 26 from 5-7p
- Costume Contest, winner gets an overnight stay with dinner, drinks, and breakfast
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- Influencer Luncheon- November- tentatively at Bear Creek- waiting for confirmation more info to come
- EPCC & WLCC holiday Luncheon- December 14 11am- 1pm Brookside Country Club
- EPCC & WLCC Movie Tavern Mixer- January 18 5pm- 8pm
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- Chamber Night at Board and Brush Allentown- February 1 5:30pm- 8:30pm
MULTI-CLUB MEMBERSHIP EVENT:
“Conversations Over Cornhole”, will happen this evening in Center Valley at the Stone Farm Cellars and Vineyards from 5:30 to 8:00 P.M.
There is no entrance fee. And you can purchase food and drink there.
POLIO ERADICATION EVENTS
Gail and Ed have done a 60+and 20+ mile ride so far.
KINGDOM LIFE FOOD DISTRIBUTION:
The next distribution will be on November 19th.
MIRACLE LEAGUE HALLOWEEN PARTY:
This will be on October 26th with AW Rotarians helping the distribution of goodies.
HABITAT FOR HUMANITY:
They always can use volunteers on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. And they will teach you any needed skills.
KIDS OF CHARACTER:
These two days of conferences this week again were promoted by Gwen Pongracz. AWRC contributed $500 to help.
MEALS ON WHEELS:
The schedule is set. Tori Morgan and Helen Papathanasiou delivered yesterday.
Helen always can use substitute members to fill a void once in a while.
MEETING SCHEDULE:
Since November 30th is the 5th Wednesday of the month, and since our Holiday Party is on December 2nd, there will be no AWRC meeting on Nov. 30th.
2023 --- Our January 4th meeting is up for a change from zoom to a “flex” meeting. We need a few members to come together and plan that very first “flex” meeting.
HAPPY DOLLARS:
Bill Palmer is extremely happy about his grandson, Christopher’s, wedding last Saturday to the lovely Madison. They now are in Costa Rica.
Ron Coleman’s son now is at Kings College in England. Soon he will go to Charleston, S.C. to visit his 5 month old granddaughter.
Jill Kearney’s daughter is in town and they have many plans.
Ernie Boll is happy that their son in Arizona had a successful hip operation yesterday.
Gail Micca is happy that their daughter is back painting again.
NEXT MORNING MEETING:
Wednesday October 26 IN PERSON at Madeline’s in Fogelsville starting at 7:30 A.M. Come on early and talk around.
Our program will be Becca McAtee, Camp Mgr at Good Shepherd Rehab Ntwrk to discuss their New Location in Center Valley.
PROGRAM:
Program Chair, Ralph Witcher, introduced the “Dream Team”, Amy Golding & Beth Kushnick from The Jewish Day School to discuss Building a Community School Post Pandemic.
Amy Golding is a dynamic and innovative educator, who has started and built educational institutions, and who brings a passion for Jewish life and a rare sense of commitment to all of her endeavors.
Golding moved to New York City after college to develop AmeriCorps VISTA service-learning programs in schools in the Bronx and Special Education District while pursuing a Masters at Columbia University Teachers College and Jewish Theological Seminary. In 1999 Golding became the firstEducation Director at The New Shul, a pluralistic creative community focusing on exploring meaningful ways to experience Jewish life and ritual. She was promoted to Executive Director in 2003 while continuing as Education Director, in order to expand the success of the school to the entire community. In 2009, Amy was selected to participate in The Institute for Not-For-Profit Management Executive Certificate program for rising Executives in the New York Metropolitan area through UJA-Federation and Columbia University Business School.
Golding then took on the role as Managing Director of Buckle My Shoe, an elite private school with two locations in downtown Manhattan. She grew the enrollment to a waiting list in a highly competitive market and managed its rebranding efforts
In 2016, Golding excitedly returned to lead her alma mater, the Jewish Day School of the Lehigh Valley. Golding forms deep partnerships with parents, teachers, board members, and volunteers and continues to manage and advance the vibrant traditions of the JDS.
Golding received her M.S. Ed. in Collaborative Leadership from Drexel University School of Education in 2018. She received a certificate in Jewish Leadership from Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in partnership with Northwestern University in 2022.
Golding is currently part of the first cohort of the Mandel Educational Leadership Program sponsored by the Mandel Institute for Nonprofit Leadership.
Beth Kushnick serves as the Director of Outreach and Engagement at the Jewish Day School of the Lehigh Valley where she works on building partnerships and collaborations, strengthening parents ‘connection to the school, and building community. In addition, Kushnick also serves as the Adult Program Coordinator at the Jewish Community Center of the Lehigh Valley. As a volunteer, she is the president of Women’s Philanthropy of the Jewish Federation of the Lehigh Valley. In her volunteer role, one of Kushnick’s main focuses is strengthening outreach to and engagement of women in the community. Kushnick runs many community initiatives including supporting Ukrainians locally and abroad.
About The Jewish Day School --------
The Jewish Day School of the Lehigh Valley prides itself on being a true community day school. We embrace Jewish diversity and deliver top-notch general and Judaic education to our students. We welcome students from families at every level of observance and affiliation, including unaffiliated, who wish to provide their children with a Jewish education. The JDS, together with our local clergy, support and strengthen the Lehigh Valley Jewish community -- one that enables a community school to flourish in a spirit of cooperation and mutual respect across all the streams of Judaism.
Here is the text of their presentation:
No photos are included.
“Good morning. My name is Amy Golding. That’s me on the left in 3rd grade at the Jewish Day School and to the right are my two children Lyla and Jax. 26 years ago, I had the opportunity to join my parents Eduardo and Jeanette Eichenwald for lunch with the Allentown West Rotary at a hotel in downtown Allentown on 10th and Hamilton. My dad was presenting on his Jewish roots, his immigration from South America to Allentown, and his career as a business owner. I watched and listened with pride. I stood when they introduced us as his honored guests, and while I was only a senior at Allen High School, I thought, “One day, I hope that I will have the opportunity to present to the Allentown West Rotarians.”
It is my honor to join you this morning to speak about the Jewish Day School of the Lehigh Valley, lovingly known as the JDS located on 23rd and Pennsylvania Streets. I am a JDS graduate (kindergarten class of 1983), JDS parent, and proud JDS Head of School.
Thank you Beth. Under normal circumstances, we’d love to have our student ambassadors provide an in-person tour at the JDS. Since that’s not possible, we are going to share a short video featuring our legacy students.
Today, we will share with you the incredible successes of the JDS as we navigated one of the most challenging times in education across the world. Running a school during the COVID pandemic was filled with challenges, but the JDS jumped feet first each step of the way and came out stronger, most notably, because of the incredible support and partnerships from our community.
The JDS is a non-profit community school serving 12 school districts and 17 zip codes including Lehigh Valley, Saucon Valley, Coopersburg, East Stroudsburg, Reading, and Nazareth.
JDS doesn’t turn away any students for financial reasons. Over 75% of our students receive scholarships.
A growing number of JDS students are from the Allentown school district, where the poverty rate is 25.6%, a number that is over double the national average of 11.4%.
Our early childhood grades are our fastest growing classes.
JDS retained 95% of our teachers during a global teacher shortage.
Staffing schools across the world has become a major concern. Whether it is called the Great Resignation or the Great Reshuffle, the teacher shortage has greatly impacted schools as they compete for teachers, as many leave the field and few enter it.
Pennsylvania saw a 66% drop in college undergraduates choosing education as a major since 2010. In-state teaching certificates fell by 66%, too, between 2009 and 2020. The rates continue to rise exponentially as the pandemic worsened over the last two years.
Needless to say, this teaching shortage is a crisis and one we must all pay attention to if we want our school to stay open and to be a hallmark school. JDS has always strived to be ahead of the next problem, and we understand that addressing salaries, retention, and recruitment must become a top priority.
We wanted to share with you what it is like to be a teacher and a parent at the JDS. Here is Britt Linn to tell you more.
On March 11, 2020, our students were celebrating the festive, joyous and paradoxical holiday of Purim. Coronavirus was creeping in and we knew it was a matter of days until our world would shift. We had already sent home packets labeled “Just in case of Corona” but...we knew if we were going to succeed we needed to forge ahead in big steps so that we could continue, without missing a beat, providing our students with a stellar educational program and a strong community no matter where we learn and what the circumstances would bring.
And so, during the Purim carnival, I approached our librarian STEAM Lab teacher, who had served in the NAVY for 24 years -- and who at the moment was currently watching children’s faces get painted as part of the Purim revelry -- if he would meet me in my office. I pulled our Social Studies teacher who was not afraid of technology (meaning she used a SMART board and chromebooks in class) to join us as well. I said we are preparing to close our school. We have 2 and a half days to come up with a plan, train our staff, and figure out the technology. We can’t focus on what we don’t have or what we don’t know, we just need to make it work. This was Wednesday.
By the next day:
We created email addresses for our lower school students. We showed all students how to log into their email addresses.
We found every laptop in the school that we owned that we had been slowly purchasing using Title funding from the state over the years.
We arranged for chromebooks to go home.
We secured hotspots for students without WiFi access.
We met after school to train teachers on terms that are all commonalities to us now but at the time were a foreign language - google meet, google classroom, Zoom, flip grid, etc.
We decided to dismiss early on Friday to give us a few hours to meet with one another to pack up all materials we would need to teach and to get ready for the unknown.
I said, aloud over and over, “closed for only two weeks,” but in my heart, I was afraid it was going to be longer.
And as our teachers left the building on Friday, March 13th at their regularly scheduled time, Governor Wolf announced “All Pennsylvania schools must close immediately.” Had we not had those 2 and half days to prepare, we would not have been ready to pull off the first of many new stages. We were not scrambling. We were ahead of the curve and we were ready.
Most notably what I learned in those 48 hours, COVID time will not match regular periods of time.
Teachers lost parents to COVID. One intern buried her father on her graduation day. Students’ grandparents were sick and in the hospital. The Lehigh Valley was hit hard and hit early. Our families started to hurt financially, emotionally and mentally, but we were holding one another stronger. We found new ways to celebrate - this time on Zoom with relatives from around the world. We hosted poetry contests and science fairs virtually.
In the pictures you can see that:
We built a lending library so families could come back to the school and connect with books and one another in a safe way.
We looked for ways to support our community and lent our 3D printer out to one of our seniors in high school who was making face shields for doctors and nurses in nursing homes. He made 125 face shields in 3 months.
We packaged food to deliver to families who were struggling.
And we continued to teach offering full days of academic growth, dance classes, gym, singing, packets to pick up from school and whatever we could do to fill the hours of the days and protect our students' well-being.
For many schools, the immediate need to upgrade technology, factor in air filtration, invest in cleaning and maintenance staff, and build outdoor learning environments seemed overwhelming. But with the support of generous donors and emergency resources, we were able to put in place the systems necessary to continue teaching and learning by returning to campus. In fact, we became a hallmark of successful pandemic experiences, thinking creatively to ensure that our mission was met even in the most difficult of circumstances.
We made the decision early on in that summer to open the school and then spent the rest of the summer figuring out how. When we opened in the fall of 2020 we were one of only a few schools that opened in the Lehigh Valley - and even the country. In addition, we offered a remote learning option 5-days a week, and a hybrid option where students could attend school for 4 days and be remote on Fridays. This meant we were going to be running 3 programs, all while focusing on everyone’s health pre-vaccines and still unsure of how the virus spread.
Our halls were filled with signs of welcoming, kindness, and affirmations but also closed water fountains. Smushed between air-dry clay, markers, and crayons, were stuffed animals with masks on and hygiene stations in and out of the classrooms. Our cafeteria was lined with individual storage containers - used to carry meals to classrooms instead of tables ready to seat 30 students at a time. And our classrooms also accommodated new needs: the large modern science lab became our second grade classroom to allow for increased enrollment and proper physical distancing.
Yet what remains constant, the love of learning, the dedication to teaching, the sense of pride and the feeling of community permeated throughout the building.
In the pictures you can see that:
We turned our art room into an infirmary - without a full-time nurse on site, we needed a place to safely triage students as they got sick.
We built outdoor classrooms, including adding WiFi to the outdoor area.
We knew we needed to equip students with individual learning kits when our doors reopened in the fall as children would no longer be able to share school supplies, plus they may need to pivot to online learning at any point and would need supplies at home. As such, we reached out to Crayola and partnered with them to fill these kits.
We had major technology needs and received a grant for 60 Dell laptops from the Emergency Connectivity Fund.
With such a stellar team of community volunteers, the JDS lobby was quickly replacing the local supermarket, Wegmans, as the place to be seen. All that changed when we closed our doors at the start of the pandemic. Yet, I knew that strong partnerships would continue to carry us through this pandemic and that became a priority for us to rethink and establish this.
We knew our families were lacking food, so we partnered with Teach PA and launched a free meal program for all children under the age of 18. We handed out 125 boxes a week containing 5 meals and 10 snacks.
We knew the first day of school would be nerve-wracking so we called the local minor league ice hockey team, the Phantoms, and asked their mascot to come greet our students for “Opening Day” alongside the So Cool Bus ice cream truck to help students (and their parents) carefully and happily “slide home.”
We, like schools across the country, were facing a teacher challenge as faculty retired, resigned and new teachers were hard to come by as they feared the risk of entering a school building. So we thought outside of the box and formed incredible partnerships creating an Artist-in-Residence with the prestigious Allentown Art Museum as well as ArtsQuest and a Scientist-in-Residence with the famous Da Vinci science center - allowing their institutions to provide ways to keep their faculty on staff during cutbacks and for us to have the opportunity to learn from world-class educators in their respective fields.
FEMA delivered 24 pallets of hand sanitizer to the JDS. It took two and a half hours to unload the 53-foot truck. We worked with local nonprofits to help distribute the donations as our community worked to open their buildings to the public like we had done for close to a year.
The last picture on this slide is our students in Harrisburg visiting JDS parent and state representative Michael Schlossberg. Raising student activists takes place in all shapes and forms. Our students go to Harrisburg every year - to request funding for security, Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) funding, and support for funding school nurses.
So much has changed in schools since the pandemic started.
Our hallway closets are now filled with COVID tests and masks instead of notebooks and pencils.
We set up vaccine and booster clinics for students so that we can get students vaccinated quickly and with ease.
We partnered with PPL on several initiatives from helping with our garden beds to help reduce waste. From individual Styrofoam lunch containers and individual plastic wrap utensils to safely reopen the campus - the waste became enormous. We closed our water fountains early on and handed out water bottles all day. So our student council fundraised for water refilling stations and with a PPL grant were able to get one.
Student mental health is on a major decline. It’s the headline in all papers. When we opened our doors in the fall, we called a therapist who often helped us by taking on our students as needed. She had a 52-person waitlist. We partnered and she now comes to the school all day on Fridays to meet with our students on-site - using parents' health insurance and arranged privately. For those who can’t afford health insurance, we partnered with the Jewish Family Service to help offset these students' therapy sessions.
We deliver food and care packages to families - both enrolled in our school and the greater community. The issue of food insecurity in our community is very high as the cost of food goes up and the food supply chain also continues to struggle. We are working on a plan for this.
Our school garden has become a main source of food for our families. We offer a free 5-day a week hot lunch plan, with a fresh salad bar to 80 students and 30 staff and faculty daily. We allow everyone in the community to harvest what they need from the vegetable garden, especially in the summer when our cafeteria is closed. We also take any extra vegetables and herbs to our local Jewish Family Service food pantry. Through a grant we have received from Whole Foods Kids, we are now using a hydroponic system to grow 26 different fruits and vegetables indoors year-round.
We know that students need proper nutrition to be able to learn and grow. This problem is not going away anytime soon so working on expanding our gardens, trying to get the proper permit for a chicken coup, and focusing on composting will all be essential parts of our educational program. In addition, the garden is calming, supporting mental health as students tend it, and also empowers them with skills they can use in the future.
Now let’s take a look at the future of a JDS student - Danny Wax, who in his graduation speech coined the term “JDS lifer” and recently graduated from high school.
We are a community school and flourish because of the support we receive from all those around us. We would love to partner with you, the members of the Allentown West Rotary Club. Here are a few ways you can get involved:
Each Friday, we have a guest speaker program. Past speakers this year included Mayor Matt Tuerk, Alla Vigneri who shared her story of being a refugee from the Ukraine in the 1990s, Jason Toff, a venture tech specialist, a pharmacist, an architect and so much more. Come share your career path, your community service activism, and the journey that made you who you are today.
We could also use in-kind donations - we noted many programs that we run and the growing costs to operate them. We are always seeking donations of papergoods for our cafeteria, school supplies for our students, and more masks as we prep for the winter months ahead. The growing list of school needs is evident and we welcome in-kind donations.
Have an idea for a school program or an initiative? We are a school that loves to bring in special programs, go on interesting field trips, and enhance curricula - we welcome your partnership and all that we can do together to help JDS continue to be a benchmark school - academically, socially, and emotionally
CLOSING:
Pres. Gail led us in reciting our motto “One profits most who serves best,” and adjourned the meeting.
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