By: centraljersey.com
Thanks to a $5,500 grant from the Hopewell Valley Education Foundation, 10 Central High School students have had a chance to write, direct and cast their own plays.
The foundation is a local nonprofit organization that helps the Valley’s schools.
One of the plays, a 10-minute work, "Grandfather Death," by student Elsa van der Wal, will be presented at the high school on Feb. 11.
"We are all thrilled to have our plays put on," said Elsa, whose piece is about the inevitability of death and is based loosely on a little-known Grimm’s fairy tale.
The CHS students will present their creations on Feb. 4 and 11 in the high school media center.
"The young playwrights can thank Language Arts teacher Tery Solomon and instructors from Princeton’s McCarter Theatre for leading them in the seminar, part of McCarter’s YouthInk! young writers’ program," school district spokeswoman Alicia Waltman said. "But the students also can thank the Hopewell Valley Education Foundation (HVEF) for funding the program with a $5,500 grant, money that would have been hard to find in this time of tight school budgets."
"The HVEF funding allows students to explore areas that you normally just don’t get to do in public schools," said Ms. Solomon, who said CHS students have been doing McCarter theater programs nearly every year for the last decade, usually with the help of HVEF funds. This year’s students will enter their plays and attend McCarter’s YouthInk! festival and competition in June.
"These programs allow the kids to meet famous playwrights, accomplished people in the theater world, and realize that they are just normal human beings," said Ms. Solomon. "It allows the students to imagine themselves as extraordinary, and lets them realize that they can be these people someday."
Making such programs happen is the stock-in-trade of HVEF, a nonprofit foundation that will make more than $22,000 in grants to fund Hopewell Valley schools’ enrichment programs this year. Their donations go to a wide range of activities, from author-in-residence programs at each of Hopewell Valley’s elementary schools, to a $1,500 grant to the CHS Robotics Club, to $1,200 to teach students about the evolution of the blues. (Find out more at www.hvef.org).
HVEF raises money from a variety of sources, including its annual Book Lovers’ Luncheon, where well-known authors speak. Other sources are area corporations, such as Janssen Pharmaceutica, and individual donors. HVEF often acts as a go-between, matching the needs of the schools to donors.
Most recently, HVEF awarded HoVal elementary schools a $5,700 grant to train third-grade teachers in using National Writing Project curriculum, a workshop approach already being used in fourth and fifth grades. "Without the support of HVEF, we would have a really tough time getting the financial support for this professional training," said district Language Arts Supervisor Frank Fusco.
"The HVEF has been a godsend to our district," said Superintendent Thomas Smith. "Without their help and support, both financial and moral, we would have a difficult time continuing our path toward excellence. I cannot thank them enough."