Park is Top Choice

It is admissions season around here, not to be confused with wabbit season. By admissions season, I mean letters of acceptance have gone out and now it is time to convince those students and their families that Park School is their best option.
For what it’s worth, I’m convinced. And here’s why:

Last week, I had the good fortune to substitute teach in an Upper School English class. The class was in the middle of reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. We discussed chapters XVII and XVIII, which focus primarily on Southern sensibilities and feudin’. The kids were brilliant and engaged. Where else would you discover connections between Huck Finn and mixed martial arts, the Ravens, and Donald Duck? One of the better definitions I’ve heard for intelligence is the ability to apply material learned in one context to another one, and these kids did that in lightning fashion. Not only that, they did it with ease and humor, and then they were able to back up their positions with textual references. Needless to say, I think we all walked out of the room with a good understanding of the reading and some new things to ponder.

Two weeks ago, aforeblogged Park graduate and author Adam Gidwitz ’00 was on campus. In the morning, he spoke with fourth and fifth graders. The kids asked him all kinds of questions about the life of a writer and the back and forth conversation was candid, heartwarming, and ultimately inspiring. Park will most certainly be producing a good many more celebrated authors in the not too distant future.
In April, we will be holding an alumni event in New York featuring a panel discussion with three of our alumni in the media world, Ruth Franklin ’91 who is on the editorial board of The New Republic, Rahsan Lindsay ’90, Vice President, MTV2, MTVU & Palladia, and Josh Tyrangiel ’90, editor of Bloomberg BusinessWeek. A dynamic trio to say the least, and they all graduated within one year of each other. That’s not to mention that earlier this month we were in New York for an event at The Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted by Malcolm Daniel ’74, Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs. Malcolm discussed the Stieglitz, Steichen, and Strand exhibit he had assembled. He was both expert and accessible.

I could keep going and going. Park fosters intellectual curiosity, and it galvanizes the passion and perseverance to follow it. For those who have the opportunity to be here, treasure it. “Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.” Mark Twain

Access is a Blue Chipper

I remember from my youth a Saturday Night Live skit based on the notion of being able to buy and sell words as stocks. Each year, there are a number of words that rise to the top of everyone’s vocabulary list. In recent years, access has become one of those words. Locally and nationally, and here at Park, access is used to talk about having the opportunity to get a quality education, investing in education, and being able to afford an education.

At the Upper School Martin Luther King Jr. assembly, we were fortunate to have three alumni speak about their roles in education. Greg White ’81, is the President and CEO of the LEARN Charter School Network in Chicago. He is a terrific guy who has dedicated his life to providing access to a high quality learning environment for students, who without these charter opportunities, would be far less likely to be in a good school. The results of his labors thus far are a stellar 99% graduation rate from the LEARN Charter Schools and an impressive college graduate rate from LEARN alumni. To read more about Learn go to www.learncharter.org

Corey Gaber ’03 is in a master’s program at Harvard’s School of Education. His concern about the disparity of a Park education and what is typically offered in Baltimore City public schools was palpable. After finishing this program, it is Corey’s intention to teach in Baltimore City.

Adria Johnson ’05 is teaching at a Baltimore City public school. She conveyed to our kids how much her students shared their same eagerness for education and how they also possessed similar potential as scholars.

All three speakers were so complimentary of each other and had great respect for what the others were doing to expand access to quality education. In the context of the assembly, Greg likened the access to education as the civil rights issue of our time. As this challenge plays out in Baltimore and the rest of the nation, there are also struggles for access at Park.

The good news is that our community continues to support financial assistance in both small and large ways. Fundraising to provide more students with the opportunity to attend Park has become our central purpose, along with supporting faculty salaries. Thankfully, our donors find that providing access to a Park education is a compelling reason to give.

For those of you who did not witness or hear about our live auction in 2009, in just 15 seconds we sold six lots priced at $4,000 to provide a full tuition to a Park student in need of financial assistance. Many people commented afterwards that they wished we had done more. Well, Saturday night at our annual Bull and Oyster Roast we’re hoping to sell 25-$1,000 lots to provide tuition support for varsity athletes in need of financial assistance. We hope that this too will be compelling. If you will not be attending the Bull Roast but would like to buy one lot or more, please just let me know.

So to this bring this thing full circle, go long on access.

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.