Because

I’ve tried to resist the blog style where there are unrelated tidbits following each other, but this time I cannot fight the urge any longer.

First things first. This is Park’s Week of Giving. We are trying to secure 500 gifts this week—which would be outrageous.

I hope you will take a look at our video— www.parkschool.net/because--where some folks explain why they give to the Annual Fund. Making this video was an extremely gratifying project. The participants were so enthusiastic about their Park experience that it created an epidemic of good feeling. The videographer, Joe Rubino, has worked with Park many times, and his understanding of the school comes through brilliantly in the finished project. Hillary Jacobs, our Director of Communications, was the organizational guru behind-the-scenes, and the results, well, see for yourself.

Bottom line: Please make your gift this week at www.parkschool.net/giveonline. Pledges are welcomed too.

Soccer season ended without a trip to the play-offs this year. Once again, however, Lucky wrung more hard-nosed good soccer out of this group than most thought possible back in August.

A few weeks ago we had an alumni event in New York that featured two of our young writers: Justin Kramon ’98, author of Finny, and Adam Gidwitz ’00, author of A Tale Dark and Grimm. Each spoke engagingly about his work. We welcomed a great crowd of young alumni who came together to see each other and to celebrate the successes of their fellow alumni.

Speaking of young alumni, huge congratulations to Anders Hulleberg ’07. Anders won the Division III National Cross Country Championship and led the Haverford Harriers to the school’s first-ever NCAA championship.

I suppose the one coherent theme of these tidbits is that Park and its alumni are vibrant, thriving, and always striving.

Have a joyful holiday season and a Happy New Year.

It's Good to Be Ruthful

On Monday we were most fortunate to have Ruth Halikman Franklin ’91 spend the day here at Park. For those of you unfamiliar with Ruth, she is an accomplished writer and reviewer and currently is on the editorial board at The New Republic. Her new book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, focuses on whether there is a special obligation for Holocaust literature to be truthful.

She was the speaker at the Upper School assembly--- a daunting challenge for many guests. You have to be intellectually engaging while simultaneously keeping the attention of 300 adolescents. Ruth excelled on both scores, and I would say her presentation was one the most impressive I’ve ever seen in this forum.

The topic has some innate emotional triggers often making it difficult to discuss, and I imagine this only heightened Ruth’s challenge in crafting her remarks. I cannot begin to do justice to her thesis, and its support. In all seriousness, I’m hoping if this blog entry gets to her, she’ll share some of her argument with this audience. One of the most impressive features of the presentation was the construction of her argument. You had to pay close attention. Each premise logically rested on the preceding one and together they built a very sound analysis of what we came to understand, is a murky debate.

We all know that we live in a world of sound bites and video postings that typically last 30 seconds. It was so refreshing to bask in a thoughtful and educative presentation. The 30-40 minutes she spoke were a well-orchestrated journey for the listener to be provoked to re-think assumptions, and ultimately to assess the validity of a most cogent thesis.

Does it help that this compelling speaker was a Park graduate? Yes, and how. Ruth deserves all of the credit, but I’m guessing that she had some pretty good mentors along the way, and probably many of them were at the ‘ole Park School.

To see some of Ruth’s work at The New Republic go to:
http://www.tnr.com/search/apachesolr_search/ruth%20franklin

or for more information about her book go to:

http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/LiteratureEnglish/WorldLiterature/Jewish/?view=usa&ci=9780195313963

The Gift from Purple Shorts

In a very significant way you need to be a part of it to truly appreciate it, but it is so powerful and amazing that I will try my best to convey some of the craft to you. For those of you who have followed Lucky Mallonee’s soccer coaching career, you know the program has enjoyed seasons full of wins and sometimes titles as well as other campaigns that included losing records. There are certain constants, however, that permeate through all of his teams regardless of wins and losses.

My perspective is as a player in the mid-eighties, and primarily as an assistant coach on his staff from the fall of ’94 through the present. For the last nine years, what soccer historians will someday come to call ‘the Ryugo Era’ we’ve been extremely competitive. We’ve enjoyed a few regular season titles, lots of play-off games, and one championship game appearance. In some ways it was harder to see Lucky’s genius with these teams because we enjoyed an abundance of talent. That is not to say that Lucky did not mold it and wring out the best of it, because he did. Let’s just say it took a discerning eye to see it.

The gift I’m alluding to is the uncanny knack to get these kids to see beyond their own self-defined potential and then to reach it. As long as I’ve been a part of his teams, and I experienced this very directly as one of his players, his intuition for an individual’s true strengths and weaknesses is most perceptive. As only a true progressive teacher can, Lucky sets about leading these individuals to maximize their strengths, and then, what’s most incredible, he leads them to identify their weaknesses and master them.

On the soccer field, you can see this process at work with this year’s squad. We do not have an overabundance of soccer talent, but the goal tending from Jake Abrams ’12 has been spectacular, and the outstanding play of striker Andrew Patterson ’11 has been integral to the team’s success thus far. This season Lucky has taken a group of athletes who got humiliated in a scrimmage at the hands of an A-Conference opponent four weeks ago and melded them into a team that is now battling the best of our B-Conference rivals to a virtual standstill.

If you’re still reading this and saying to yourself ‘that’s all well and good’ but at the end of the day who really cares about high school soccer?’ then here’s the point. After living through this experience and receiving the gift of Lucky’s coaching, these kids go out into the ‘real world’ and apply the lessons learned. The results are a steady stream of emails, letters, and calls from high-achieving professionals in all walks of life, including Hollywood executives, college professors, attorneys, financial magnates, and doctors, all saying that they got to where they are in life by applying themselves the way Mr. Mal taught them.

At Park, we have lots of meetings, and we talk about many areas of the Park experience. Sometimes we talk about athletics, and we wrestle with questions like, ‘how can we express to the ‘outside world’ how special Park athletics truly are?’ Oh, and of course, everyone wants that accomplished with a tag line to match our society’s diminished attention span. Well, here’s one about the old man in purple shorts who roams Kelly Field in the fall, “He doesn’t just win games, he changes lives.”

High Tide

If you were driving around town on Labor Day weekend you probably saw firefighters’ raising funds for the fight against muscular dystrophy through their boot campaign. I love the boot campaign and happily gave. As I dropped my bills into the boot, and received a very warm smile and thank you, I had a flashback of the aftermath of 9/11. There seemed to be a period of months after the tragedy, maybe through the end of the year, when all Americans seemed to go out of their way to help one and other. You noticed it at the most mundane times--while driving, passing through doorways, and other times when we tend to ignore others. We suddenly became a more empathetic nation.

We, as a nation, and on a smaller scale as a Park community, are constantly looking for opportunities to help. Our reasons are myriad, but there is no denying we are a better country or community for it, and moreover it creates a near palpable sensation of good feeling.

Let me say, I don’t intend for these posts to always focus on giving. (By the way the Boys’ Varsity Soccer Team, on which I serve as Lucky’s assistant coach, has home games this week on Tuesday and Thursday at 4:00, and we’d love your support.) But back to the good feelings. At Park, we do a lot of helping. The Parents’ Association has raised funds for a number of causes, including multi-year support for the Susan Komen Race for the Cure and for Haitian relief. Then, of course, there is the fundraising for Park, or more specifically for the students and faculty at Park. All of these efforts bring out what I believe is our natural desire to support important needs. The result is that there is a lot of good feeling around here.

What can I say? I think giving is a good thing. Someone an awful lot smarter than me said, “A rising tide raises all ships,” and ‘Bama football fans far more devoted than me have spent countless hours chanting, “Roll Tide Roll.” I agree with both sentiments.

Who Rocks

By Roger Seidenman, Director of Development


My favorite moment as a blogger came two years ago when I was writing about the virtues of a Park education and ended the piece with a quote from The Who. Stupidly, I asked a friend who had read the post what she thought of it. She admitted sheepishly, “I liked the last line.” So in that spirit I thought I would bring back some of Pete Townshend’s wisdom regarding our new Annual Fund.


“I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution


Take a bow for the new revolution


Smile and grin at the change all around.”


Last year we completely overhauled how we run the Annual Fund. We switched to a model that allowed our devoted volunteers to discuss giving with their prospects on their own schedules rather than responding to a school-scheduled series of phoning nights. Ultimately the results were good. Our unrestricted giving went up more than 6% in a year that still included a challenging national and global economy.


Another benefit to the new system was how many more first-time solicitors joined in the effort. Many of these new volunteers expressed how energizing it was to help the school in this endeavor.


It is now a new year, and we have many of our volunteers returning, and as always we are looking for new voices to help. One way to start is to join us at this year’s Annual Fund kick-off breakfast on Tuesday, September 21 beginning at 7:45am for faculty and staff and at 8:30am for the rest of the Park community in the Lieberman Building. If you can’t make it, and want to volunteer for the Annual Fund, feel free to reply to me at rseidenman@parkschool.net or Becky Bridger, Annual Fund Coordinator, at rbridger@parkschool.net.


So after a long, hot summer of thinking about the Annual Fund, here’s my current view on how great the Annual Fund is and the role that it plays in Park’s financial picture.


The Annual Fund:
1.) Makes it possible for students and families who would not otherwise be able to attend Park to do so;
2.) Supports faculty salaries (though there will never be enough to compensate them for their intellect and dedication).
3.) Unites us in supporting an institution that we all love.


Thanks for all of your support. We’re looking forward to another terrific year.

Update from Bruinland

By Roger Seidenman, Director of Development

I’d be lying if I said there was a hue and cry to bring back my blog, but there have been a few of you who have asked for it to return (thanks big fella, you know who you are), and even if those requests were made out of pity, here goes:  Last year, I tried to steer my blog clear of fundraising life at Park School, and I focused primarily on the classroom and the fields.  Since the lion’s share of my time is spent working on growing the Annual Fund and increasing the school’s endowment, I thought perhaps I’d share some observations as the fiscal year winds down.

This year we tried a completely different approach for the Annual Fund. In design, the plan was to virtually eliminate our standard on-campus phoning sessions and assign each volunteer ten prospects who they would contact at their convenience. So far, I’d say it has been a success.  We’ve enlisted many more volunteers than in years past.  In terms of dollars raised, we’re running neck and neck with last year and hoping, as always, to finish strong.  Surprises along the way included discovering how many volunteers like the structure of phoning at Park.  So next year, we’ll again try to devise a framework that accommodates our volunteers and our donors.

The endowment efforts continue in a leadership gift phase.  Much work is put in before gifts are committed, but the progress has been rapid in the last few months.  Planned gifts are becoming more common as a means of providing for Park.  Perhaps more about that in the weeks to come.

We had a fabulous auction that surpassed our wildest expectations in what could be raised. Liz Block, auction chair, masterfully navigated some very choppy waters, and Ellen Small, formally, Parent Program Coordinator, and less formally, Auction Maven, helped make sure the event came off in fantastic fashion.  Feel good moment of the night was the live auction item to provide a full year’s tuition.  Six guests each bid $4,000 to support a full tuition.  It was sold in less than fifteen seconds.  Thank you to President of the Board of Trustees Josh Fidler for this innovative, and very successful, idea.

We’re looking forward to the 2010 Park Golf Classic on Monday, May 24 at Chestnut Ridge Country Club.  There are a few spots left if you’re interested.  Just contact Jayme Gilden Wood ’93 at jwood@parkschool.net. There are big plans for Alumni Weekend of May 21-22, including an all-community Toast to the Brown & White Cocktail Party and a special event to honor Jim Howard’s retirement on May 24.  Learn more and RSVP at www.parkschool.net/events.

A lot to cover in the first blog of the season.  Ultimately, it has been a good year.  We hope to have a strong finish to the Annual Fund, and if you have not yet made your contribution, please know how much your participation is valued and needed. You can do that at www.parkschool.net/giveonline

I’ll aim to be blogging more frequently.  Things are good in Bruinland, and you should know about as many of them as possible.