By Bruce Pollock | Executive Director
The FREE Partnerships Annual Meeting held on April 24 was a wonderful event. Over 80 people attended the meeting in the Kate Gleason Auditorium in the Rochester Central Library. The program began with a welcome from Board Member, Kevin Loughran. Executive Director, Bruce Pollock, provided a review of the prior year. Here are the highlights of that review:
Who are the Friends of Educational Excellence?
We are:
The achievements for the last year include:
Bruce showed a video filmed and produced by filmmaker Mara Ahmed about the Partnership programs in Schools 15 and 50.
The evidence of how well the FREE Partnerships programs can work is demonstrated by the success of the School 52 Partnership where the school's rankings (out of 38 elementary schools) in the NYS English and Math tests have improved dramatically over the last six years (2006 to 2011):
The success of each FREE Partnerships programs is based on the wonderful support the school principals have provided.
Bruce concluded his remarks with recognition of the wonderful financial support that has been provided by all the Friends of Educational Excellence, especially the following Sustaining Donors that contributed $1,000 or more:
After Bruce's remarks, there was a panel discussion about the new cradle-to-career initiative in Rochester called ROC the Future, which is based on the Strive framework developed in Cinncinati, Ohio. The panel included:
Originally, RCSD Interim Superintendent, Bolgen Vargas, was to be the Keynote Speaker of the Annual Meeting and participate on the ROC the Future panel. However, he was named the permanent RCSD Superintendent that morning and so he could not attend the Annual Meeting at the start. Dr. Vargas did arrive later in the meeting and came to the podium amongst a standing ovation to provide some remarks and take questions from the audience.
After Dr. Vargas's remarks, Bruce named the recipients of the FREE Partnerships Leaders Awards at each school. These leaders came up to the podium and receive their Recognition Award handed to them by Dr. Vargas. The partnership leaders are:
Partnership Leaders Recognition
School 7 – Teacher: Beth Cross
First Universalist Church: Sarah Singal
School 10 – Teacher: Alva Vives
Community Christian Church: Lisa November
School 12 – Teachers: Susan Snyder, Laurie Murty
Highland Park Association: Vicki Robertson, Lori Bryce
School 15 – Teachers: Jennifer Benton, Jayne Alba
First Unitarian Church: Ann Bayley, Chris Farnum
School 20 – Volunteer Coordinator: Paula Hansen
Mt Olivet Baptist Church: Valerie Medley
School 22 – Teacher: Kim Mendelson
First Unitarian Church: Ann Bayley, Chris Farnum
School 34 – Teacher: Cindi Shear
St. Catherine of Siena Church: Terry Riordan
School 39 – AP: Rebecca Boyle; Parent Liaison: Yvetta Nelson
Church of the Transfiguration: Bob Flynn, Helen Konz, Charlie Newton
School 50 – Teachers: Janet Bird, Robin Valoris
St. Joseph’s Church: Patty Vermilion
School 52 – Jason Branner, Danielle Branner
Temple B’rith Kodesh: Don Ginsberg, Judith Slade
Overall, the 2012 Annual Meeting was a glorious event which provided wonderful momentum for the work to be done in 2012 and beyond.
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
