By Bob Harris
Last month, in an end-of-year celebration of achievement, Community School District 26 held an Awards Evening at Benjamin Cardozo High School. A reception was held in the cafeteria. Community School Board President Sharon Maurer welcomed the audience and the Dance Troupe from PS 173 presented a South Asian Dance Performance and then the students from the district schools were presented awards by Superintendent Claire McIntee, Deputy Superintendents Stanley Weber and Anita Saunders, as well as the School Board members.
The elementary, middle and junior high school students received a plethora of awards for academic achievement, general achievement, art, mathematics, science and writing. There were state awards, grants, Citations of Excellence, Citywide winners, Citywide Trophy winners, Boroughwide winners, an Educator of the Year Award, instruments given to a school, a Labor Heritage award, Grand Prize winners, Roundtable monetary awards, World Trade Center Grants, free newspapers from Newsday, gold medals, bronze medals, trophies, classroom supply awards and all kinds of first-, second- and third-place winners. Some students won $100, $200, $800, $1,000, $2,500 or $3,000. There were 17 pages with about 30 students listed on each page describing who received these awards.
These certificates, money grants and trophies were provided by such groups as the Johns Hopkins Talent Search, Columbia Teachers College Contest City Stories, CSA Effective School Award, Little Neck Douglaston Lion’s Club Woman of the Year, New York City Hispanic Achievement Award, NYS Assembly Sept. 11 Response Team, NYS Lottery 2002 Winter Achievers, United We Stand Memorial Contest, NYC Fire Department Fire Safety Contest, NY is a Book Country Reading Bee Contest, Walk/Jog-a-thon for Juvenile Diabetes, Catholic Teachers Association, I’m a Green Nation Statewide Award, NYC-DEP 16th Annual Water Conservation and Poetry Contest, Annual Children’s Dental Health Month Contest, Queens County Dental Society and the Memorial Day Parade Committee Party Writing Contest.
Other participants were the Chancellor’s Caring Community Award, VHI Save the Music Foundation/Time Warner Cable Contest, South Asian Dance & Storytelling Festival, St. John’s University School of Education Outstanding Cooperating Teacher Award, Korean Association of Greater New York Award, NYS Martin Luther King Jr. Picture Contest, Annual Kidsday Contest, Zoom Into Action-Channel 13, Scholastic Magazine Art Poster Contest, Colgate “My Bright Smile” contest, NYC Women’s History Contest, ASPCA Art Contest, Common Cents Penny Harvest, JP Morgan Chase Active Learning Grant, NY Mathematics League Math Team Award, NYC Science Olympiad Award, NYS Regional Science Olympiad, The American Library of Poetry and the American Literacy Council’s State Poetry Contest, Ezra Jack Keats Book Making contest, and the Goudreau Museum of Mathematics in Art and Awareness Contest.
Often these groups gave five or 10 students these awards. All the schools in School District 26 had students who won awards. This includes our local Fresh Meadows schools PS 26, PS 178, PS 173 and JHS 216. The booklet of the awards is quite thick.
GOOD AND BAD NEWS OF THE WEEK
We have a new scandal. WorldCom Inc. telecommunications company is accused of inflating profits by billions. This comes on top of Enron’s scandal, as well as other scandals. Will workers at WorldCom also loose their pension savings? How many millions did top executives receive? Are they worth so much money? It always bothered me that top executives have received so much money in pay, stock options and pension buyouts. It has been going on for years. If our government leaders had just stopped these activities years ago it wouldn’t be so rampant today.
Has there been too much deregulation the way the City Building Department has self certification? There have been too many lobbyists giving out too much money to too many legislators for too long. Our government should be protecting us from these crooks. Someone talking with me about these frauds commented that, “If one of us little people did some of these crooked things we would be in jail by now.” It is too bad that these crooked executives are still walking around free with the money they stole. It makes one think!
