The Birth of Team 2234 The Birth of Team 2234 - Episcopal Academy

Episcopal Academy Lower
School Students Participate
in “Read to Feed”
More than $2,500 raised to help Heifer
International’s program
What do cows, chickens and goats have to do with
reading? Lower Schoolers at the Devon Campus
can tell you. Starting in March, students
from pre-kindergarten through 5th grade started
reading books to support Heifer International’s Read to Feed
program. The more books the students read, the more money
they raised to provide hungry families with farm animals. The
students received pledges from family members and friends per
book read or the amount of time spent reading.
The 225 students at Devon collected a total of $2,738, which
will help to provide food- and income-producing farm animals,
and the training needed for their care, to hungry families
around the world.
Pictured above are third graders (from left to right)
Sidney Maple, Jeffrey Coote, Darian Smith, and
Kabir Gupta.
Members of the environmental
ethics class in the 5th grade spent
time at Lincoln Financial Field
earlier this year to learn about the
Eagles’ environmental and recycling
initiatives.
32 Connections
Episcopal Academy
Lower School Students
Visit Lincoln Financial
Field to Learn About
“Go Green”
Members of Episcopal’s 5th grade class at Devon
visited Lincoln Financial Field and the Philadelphia
Eagles early this spring to learn more about
the team’s “Go Green” environmental and recycling
initiative as part of their environmental ethics class.
Teachers Catherine Bennett, Rev. Heather Patton-Graham, and
Susan Swanson teach the class and chaperoned the children on
the trip.
Episcopal’s environmental ethics class focuses on recycling,
maintaining green spaces, and environmental accountability.
The students met in the press room with Julie Hershey, community
relations director for the Eagles. She explained that the
Eagles’ owners were dedicated to giving something back to the
environment when they built the new stadium. As part of that
giving back, they have donated thousands of trees to local organizations,
including 300 that were planted at Philadelphia
public schools.
The Eagles are the first team in the NFL to address environmental
responsibility. Their mission statement reads: “To
create and sustain championship performance on the field and
in the community through programs that promote the quality
of life in our region, green the environment to improve our impact
on the planet, and enhance our profitability as a business.”
The students learned that they do this five ways: striving to be
carbon neutral, purchasing clean energy, green purchasing, recycling,
and publicity.
It was a wonderful opportunity for Episcopal’s students to
see an environmental program in action and they were thrilled
to actually walk on the field.
Development
Harold Starr ’50
Discusses An
Opportunity
Too Good
to Pass Up
did I, a member
of the Class of
1950, contribute
“Why
to Episcopal’s current
Capital Campaign? It started as
our class was preparing for our 50th reunion,
when I returned to EA for the first
time in years and had a chance to see
the school as it is today. I was pleased
to note that EA was continuing to stress the importance of values—that
EA’s motto, ‘To Be, Rather Than To Seem To Be’ is
still seen as the standard to live by. It was not difficult for me to
conclude that Episcopal was truly worth supporting.
“It was my classmate, Dave Crockett, (a formidable fundraiser)
who convinced me that an easy way to make a gift would be
to include Episcopal in my estate plan—and that if I did, that
this planned gift would be credited to our class gift. How best
to do this? On learning that I had an IRA, Dave pointed out
that from a tax standpoint it made much more sense to have the
gift come from my IRA and not from my other assets. I changed
my IRA to provide that EA would get a percentage of my IRA
on my death.
“Then two things happened: (1) EA, finding itself needing
a lot of cash to pay for the very exciting new campus at Newtown
Square and to greatly increase its endowment, announced
an ambitious Capital Campaign; and
(2) on August 27, 2006 the Internal
Revenue Code was amended to make
it possible for people to make cash
gifts from their IRAs (including Roth
IRAs) to charities without paying any
taxes. This new provision has important
restrictions: the IRA owner must
be at least 70-and-a-half at the time of
the gift; the maximum amount of such
IRA gifts may not exceed $100,000 in
any year; and the gifts may be made
in 2006 and 2007 only.
“I concluded that the change in the
law provided me with an opportunity
too good to pass up. What I did was
propose to Episcopal that I scrap the
old arrangement under which Episcopal
got its money from the IRA after I
James “Bruiser”
Flynt ’83 Speaks to
Episcopal Scholarship
Recipients
Harold Starr ’50 poses with grandson Nicholas Wagg ’18
died and replace it with a new one—a gift now from my IRA to
the Capital Campaign
“The outcome? A win-win for everyone. From Episcopal’s
standpoint, it got a substantial gift now at a time when it really
needs funds. From my standpoint, although I will get somewhat
less from my IRA during my lifetime, I have the satisfaction of
knowing that I am helping EA now when it really needs it and
that I will be able to see the tangible results of my gift during
my lifetime.
“I urge all members of the EA family over 70-and-a-half who
have IRAs and who want the pleasure of supporting an outstanding
independent school to take advantage of this change
in the law by making gifts to Episcopal’s Capital Campaign
now out of their IRAs.”
Ham Clark (far left) and coach/
faculty member Dan Dougherty
(second from left) caught up
with James “Bruiser” Flynt ’83,
current head coach of the men’s
basketball team at Drexel (in
center), as well as Helen and John Meehan ’86 (shown at right), during Episcopal’s Annual
Scholarship Lunch. Flynt spoke eloquently to current scholarship recipients and benefactors
about his time at Episcopal and how it helped prepare him for the future. Current
scholarship benefactors, the Meehan family established a scholarship in memory of Tom,
Helen’s husband and John’s father, in 2004.