WESTFIELD – Just as city residents will be gearing up for St. Patrick’s Day, members of the Westfield Foundation for Education are hoping folks will gather for some luck of the Irish for themselves at it’s first annual Shamrock Showdown Trivia Night on Friday, March 13.
Scheduled for a 6:30 p.m. start at East Mountain Country Club, the event will allow participants to form teams of four to test their knowledge across 10 rounds of trivia, with appetizers being served and with prizes awarded to the top two teams.
Items will also be raffled off during the event, including four reserved seats to the graduation ceremonies at Westfield High School and Westfield Vocational-Technical High School this spring.
Tickets for the event are currently going for $25 per person, with the money going to the foundation, a new organization formed by parents of Westfield students looking to help teachers throughout the district.
“All of the money raised by WFE will go right back to Westfield public schoolchildren,” said WFE President Amber Danahey. “It will be a fun night out for a good cause.”
In 2014, the organization awarded more than $5,000 to 11 projects in nine of the city’s 12 schools.
Some of these projects included an elementary-level astronomy program, a before-school health and fitness program, a high school multi-year mural project and a middle school-level extracurricular reading program.
“Our hope is to double that. We’d love to give out $10,000 in grants to teachers next year,” said WFE Vice President Janine Queenin. “We’re hoping the community will get on board with us and help support the schools.”
Queenin, a mother of two Westfield students, said that, as more district teachers learn about the foundation’s grants, the better the quality of education that the district’s students will receive.
“It is hard nowadays, with budgets being slashed all across the state, and of course they have the MCAS they have to work with,” said Queenin. “Sometimes you wonder if teachers have enough time in the day to do what they want to do that they’ve been able to do in the past and one of our goals is to provide resources to teachers so they have to pay out of their own pocket, which many of them do.”
Thef foundation’s unique role as a helping hand for the district’s teachers is felt in many communities around western Massachusetts, where Foundation’s for Education have been popping up all over for years.
“They’re all over the country and in Amherst, Northampton, Easthampton, they all have very successful education foundations that have been around for years,” said Queenin. “We just hope we’ve created a long lasting foundation that will get a lot of community support, that will help teachers and the kids and improve their experience. That’s really our long-term goal.”
