May 6, 2024 - A PROUD FATHER AND A MESSAGE OF HOPE
A PROUD FATHER AND A MESSAGE OF HOPE
May 6th, 2024
Good morning friends,
Sometimes a father just has to brag. I have five kids, and I love all of them, but this past week all of my buttons burst with pride as my daughter Karena Ann Bernunzio-Miller pulled off the most amazing event at the Rochester City School District’s World of Inquiry School. This unique city school was founded in 1967 two years after the Rochester historic race riots and civil unrest. It was intended to bring healing. It was an experimental type of education that was actually open to suburban and urban children together. Expeditionary learning has a long history. In its most rudimentary form, students learn from doing rather than sitting in classrooms. The key concept is “crew"….working together to solve problems. Teachers work in teams, so that each subject is integrated into an expedition that the children will follow through and report on. Initially, WOIS was an elementary school, that is Kindergarten through 6th grade. Kara transferred there 15 years ago when the district decided to make the school the only K-12 in the district and extend this learning method to the upper grades. Of course urban districts do not have the resources to fund these types of special programs so over the course of the years most of the expeditions have been mere shells of their former self. There just wasn’t the money to operate this program in the way that it needed to be done. Kara is in charge of the senior "capstone project" where each senior student has to select an idea or project to benefit the community, research it….culminating in a presentation at the end of the year.
Last fall Kara got a group of 11th grade students together with the idea of planting flowers for Hope. She, and a group of students planted 1967 tulip bulbs. The number was selected because that is the year the school started. Very few of the students had ever done anything remotely similar to this. It was a dark cold fall day, and the idea that beautiful flowers would appear after the winter was remote. With the beautiful warm weather we’ve had in the past few weeks, the entire school grounds has burst into a pallet of color. They planned a schoolwide activity day where everyone would be involved in cleaning up the grounds and showing off the beauty of the tulips. Kara had applied for a grant from the national Expeditionary Learning organization. While we were in Holland last month, she received a message that the entire project had gotten the attention of the national organization dedicated to expeditionary education. They sent a film crew to do a documentary on Kara’s project to share with the entire Expeditionary Learning community nationwide! It will be showcased that their national conference in Atlanta along with two of the students from the WOIS who will be presenting. The local news media also picked up on it and below is the link to the broadcast. When I saw my daughter on television talking so intelligently AND passionately, my eyes welled up with pride. I love my kids because I love what they do and how they intend to make the world a better place. I have included a lot of pictures without captions. They just captured the day. Julie also helped out with the cleanup of the grounds and supplied me with lots of great photos.
https://www.rochesterfirst.com/news/local-news/rochester-students-celebrate-better-world-day/
But the whole concept is best explained in the words of my daughter. Here is a link to her Facebook post on the entire project. She is the real deal:
With peace,
John Bernunzio