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In My View: Catholic Schools help bring a community together As students, teachers and administrators swing into the second half of the school year following Catholic Schools Week it is a fair time to answer the question: What makes a community oriented school such as St. Martin of Tours in Amityville? A school is the tie that binds a community together from the children who attend and are the community's future to the parents who presently give their support; to the teachers who dedicate their careers to education and stay year after year. But, a school that represents a community, a parish and the people that comprise those entities is much more. It is a few hard working fathers, who after a long work week rise early to paint, then install sheet metal in the school's renovated kitchen. It is a group of mothers, who after either working full or part time jobs, or completing the countless, thankless responsibilities of a mother all day gather together to organize a small fundraiser and coordinate plans for a much larger fundraiser. It is a group of teachers that put in extra hours to create an inviting, stimulating, learning environment by decorating their classrooms, then taking their time during the school year to sit down with students to push them further. It is a new administration that will listen to fresh ideas, while understanding that the previous approach, though it may need some updating, is not all that bad, and it takes some time for everyone to change. An eternal optimism exists in the people involved, from which a great majority believe that many obstacles can be overcome by hard work, good planning and a little luck to forge ahead and solve such problems as improving the school's financial health. A community school involves the community and a hand has been extended to the area's residents to join parents to purchase SCRIP, which raises money for the school, while inviting community members to attend the fundraisers that also adds fiscal aid to the school. Webster's College dictionary defines community as a group pf people, who reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage. All of those characteristics are shared by the community St. Martin of Tours School serves, but we also define community as a place where people can count on others to help in good times or bad and its school is where those values are learned and nurtured.
Jeffrey Bessen The writer is a parent of a student at St. Marin of Tours School in Amityville
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