The Pike County Youth Coalition will be convening a meeting on June 9 to discuss a national service initiative and how our community can be a part of it. The letter below is being sent to various service organizations and community leaders.

Pike County Summer Service Initiative

To Whom It May Concern:

I recently had the honor of joining the First Lady in Washington, DC for a meeting to discuss a new service initiative that will be launched next month by the Corporation for National and Community Service. I am excited to share what I have learned with you and to gather your feedback. Hopefully, you and/or your organization will be interested in becoming involved.

The Summer Service Initiative is designed to engage citizens across the country in high-impact, community-based service projects. It will be announced with a call to service by the President in early June and take place between June 22 and September 11. The focus will be on economic recovery, particularly around education, energy/environment, healthcare and community renewal. Its purpose is to bolster civic engagement and to establish public/private partnerships to develop sustainable service opportunities for all Americans.

At a time when we face tremendous challenges, Americans have demonstrated a desire to give back at levels unprecedented in decades. The initiative aims to funnel this energy into meeting growing social needs, town-by-town and city-by-city. The White House and federal agencies will be generating excitement about this national initiative and providing resources through www.serve.gov; it will be our task to locally develop one or more ways to engage the many citizens that are expected to become interested and look to contribute in their own backyard.

This is an extraordinary opportunity for community leaders, volunteers and organizations in Pike County to come together to work on a project this summer that focuses on specific issues within our own community, while engaging and expanding our local volunteer base. The recently completed Wayne/Pike Needs Assessment provides a great place to start in identifying one or more areas of focus for such a project.

You or a representative from your organization are cordially invited to attend a meeting on Tuesday, June 9 at the County Administration Building’s basement conference room to brainstorm and plan a project for the summer service initiative. The meeting will either be held at 9:00 AM or 7:00 PM, depending on when more people are able to attend. Please RSVP at your earliest convenience, indicating if either or both times are preferable. The invitation is open, so please feel free to forward this to any person or organization you believe might be interested.

It is my hope that we can create a consensus at this meeting about what kind of project we can jointly launch on June 22 and how we each can contribute to its success. I look forward to hearing back from you.

Sincerely,

Nick Troiano

Executive Director, PCYC

From the newly launched www.milfordmagazine.com:

The Pike County Public Library today filed an application with Milford's Architectural Review Board. The new plans incorporates a number of significant changes reflecting input from the Milford Boro Council, Architectural Review Board and the boro's consulting architect, Peter Benton. Benton's December 15, 2008, report detailing criticisms of the previous design was adopted by the ARB and it is this report to which the Library's new design is responsive.

More here: http://www.milfordmagazine.com/single/? tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=146&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=1&cHash=b86fecc6b4

The Pike County Child Death Review Team is holding a Reality Tour at the First Presbyterian Church in Milford from 12pm – 3pm on Saturday, February 21, 2009. You can download the sign- up form here: http://www.mediafire.com/? sharekey=e193c9303a84e6f291b20cc0d07ba4d2e0da1a754a44bb69.

The Reality Tour, a dramatic, narrative, interactive walk in the life of a teen on heroin can be presented in any community – urban or rural using CANDLE, Inc.’s Reality Tour Program Model. Parents rate it as ‘priceless’. Thousands of PA residents have attended the parent/child Reality Tour to understand the full spectrum of substance abuse and participate in a Q & A session with law enforcement officers, parents of addicts and addicts in recovery. In PA the Atty. General has supplied funding to purchase the program It is a research-based (NREPP Review Pending) program.

The purpose of the Child Death Review Team is to review deaths of children ages birth – 21 years and suggest preventative measures to implement in the community to prevent further deaths. The Pike County team has identified drug prevention as a needed resource in our community. We have been training several dedicated volunteers to conduct this program in Pike County.

I am and will always be a “govie.” What is a govie, you ask? It is your son’s first grade teacher. It is the architect who designed your house. It is the researcher who helped develop your antibiotics. It is your best friend, it may even be you.

For those readers who are not familiar with the Governor’s Schools of Excellence (PGSE), the top juniors and seniors from high schools around the state are selected to attend class, tuition free, for five weeks. Areas of study include: the school of Arts, Sciences, Global Entrepreneurship, Health Care, Information Society and Technology, International Studies, Teaching, and Agricultural Sciences. Graduates are govies.

Governor Rendell has recently announced that due to budget cuts, these eight schools of excellence may have to be terminated. A decision could come any day.

Each of these schools produces a myriad more of better educated more mature and learned people than any other program in the country. Although the entire country is in a stressful economic crisis, without the opportunity of Governor’s school, so many students like me would not have the opportunities we have now.

I attended the School for the Arts (PGSA) this summer which opened the door for me into almost any art school I wanted to attend. Also, for many schools in-state, being a PGSE alumnus offers scholarships unavailable to other students. I ask, no, I beg of you to help support the cause to keep these Governor’s schools. The opportunity given to me has changed my life, and to take that away from anyone in the future is unfair.

I saw with my own eyes as 200 kids from all over the state grew together and became a more mature group of people. These are the people that will advocate the arts in our future that will keep them alive for the generations to come. I know as well that in the other Governor’s Schools, a very similar bond was made between the students and that all of those students feel the same way about their own Governor’s School. PGSA became my family. Everyone was greeted with smile and left with many hugs and promises of further contact. The relationships that were created are the threads that will grow to create amazing connections in the future.

As an active citizen of Pennsylvania, I am so disheartened to hear that the Governor now wants to end the program. When parents, grandparents, friends and family greet the student that has just spent their summer learning from this amazing and eye opening program, they just know that the program has changed their loved one for the better. Almost every alumnus from any Governor’s school feels very similarly but our voices may not be enough.

We need your help, and so do all of the potential artists, dancers, doctors, teachers, biologists, photographers, writers, computer scientists, global entrepreneurs and anyone else who could have the opportunity to attend PGSE in the future. We need you to show Governor Rendell how important these programs are. It may cost a lot but I think those extra dollars going towards hundred’s of children’s well being each year are worth it. Every PGSE is a life changing experience and the lives of the kids who come out of there are worth more than saving money.

Kathryn Yuen is a student at Delaware Valley High School and a member of the Pike County Youth Coalition.

The following is reposted from the Pike County Courier, another view on the library project.

To the taxpayers of Milford Borough:

Be assured, the Milford Borough Council is concerned about the money being spent to review and analyze the current building design proposed by the Pike County Public Library. It is not an easy decision for the council to spend this money as we are also taxpayers of the Borough. (A proponent of the project from an outlying community would lead you to believe that residents of her community share in this cost. They do not. When someone says “our tax dollars”, they should be accurate. She is not, and her attack is unwarranted and unfair.) But sometimes the Borough has to spend dollars to protect the interests of the town that we all call home.

As Council members and Architectural Review Board (ARB) members, we have an obligation to see that the ordinances in the borough are applied fairly across the board. This includes private owners, government buildings and corporate America. There cannot be one interpretation of our ordinances for one group and another for the rest of the world. We have never acted this way in the past and we did not want to do so now. However, we anticipated (correctly as it turned out) that some people connected with this project would not respect a decision if it was only made by us locals.

At least one member of the group supporting the current design has stated that she has been in the design business for 30 years and this is all about taste. She could not be more wrong. This is not about taste. It is about compliance with specific architectural guidelines. We also knew that there was a large group of people that had seen the proposed design in the papers and did not like it. Whatever decision was made, we needed expert help and we knew it. (It is ironic that some of the same people that are in favor of spending huge sums on an architect question spending a small fraction of that sum on an expert to review his work.)

To get the help needed, we hired Architect Peter Benton because he is a renowned expert and respected professional. In hiring Benton, we obtained an unbiased opinion from an expert in the field of historic preservation. This action was undertaken not to stop the project, but rather to ensure compliance with the ARB ordinance and guidelines as a necessary step in the permitting process.

The ARB ordinance was enacted to see that the borough kept its historic small town quaint appeal. Not to say we don’t want new buildings, we do, but what we want is the ordinance to be followed. That is the only agenda that the council and the ARB have regarding the library project. Remember, no member of the library board or building committee questioned the ordinance and guidelines until they were applied to this building design. The public officials in the Borough embrace the idea of a new library in Milford; we have always supported the library with local taxes. While it may have been small in relation to the library’s budget, we have always given our fair share and we will continue to support it in the future.

To view more, please visit: http://www.strausnews.com/articles/2009/01/30/pike_county_courier/opinion/2.txt