Daniel Kucharik Wins Shandy Hill Essay Award

Submitted Photos

From left, Greater Pottstown Foundation board members Robert Morgan, board president Paul Prince, Alan Altchul and Patricia Crosson along with this yewar's essay contest winner Daniel Kurcharik.

 Blogger's Note: The following was provided by the Greater Pottstown Foundation.

Each year the Greater Pottstown Foundation sponsors the Shandy Hill Essay Contest for senior students from The Hill School, Owen J. Roberts, Pottsgrove and Pottstown High Schools. The essay contest and award honor Shandy Hill, the Foundation’s founder and the original editor of the Pottstown Mercury from 1931 until he retired in 1967. Mr. Hill was an ardent believer in supporting education opportunities for students within the Pottstown Community. The Greater Pottstown Foundation strives to continue that worthy objective through various education related grants and student scholarship awards.

Each year senior students from the four area schools, compete in the writing of an original essay which is to focus on some aspect of life in the Greater Pottstown Area. The Foundation seeks the writer’s original and personal interpretation of how any aspect of life is effected by living in this area as opposed to somewhere else. In any year that a winning essay is chosen, the writer is granted a $30,000 college scholarship to be used over four years.

This year, the Foundation received essays from 31 applicants. The Board was happy to note that, while the majority of essays always seem to come in from The Hill School, and Owen J Roberts High School, the participation from Pottstown and Pottsgrove was indeed somewhat greater this year. Ideally, the Foundation would be pleased to see a more proportional participation from all four Pottstown Area high schools.

The Board of Directors of the Greater Pottstown Foundation is proud to announce that the 2019 winner of the Shandy Hill Essay Contest is Daniel Kucharik, of North Coventry Township, and a graduating senior from Owen J. Roberts High School. Dan has been a member of the National Honor Society his junior and senior years. He also participates in various school instrumental music programs including the Marching Band, Concert Band, Indoor Percussion Ensemble, and Jazz Band, playing mostly mallet percussion instruments like the marimba and others.

Dan is also a proud member of Leo, the youth arm of Lions Club International. Leo Club members

Daniel Kucharik

work with local Lions Clubs around the world in the performance of service and humanitarian projects for their communities. Leo was started here in Pennsylvania in 1957, but now has more than 175,000 youth members in 145 different countries.

Dan will be attending West Chester University next year where he will pursue his interests in music education and composition.

Dan bravely contributed a very poignant and personal essay about his experiences growing up with the medical and psychological condition known as gender dysphoria. According to the American Psychiatric Association, people with gender dysphoria (GD) typically experience significant distress (and/or problems functioning) associated with conflict between the way they feel and think of themselves (their experienced or expressed gender), and their physical or assigned gender. In the past, this condition was called “gender identity disorder”, but medical and psychology professionals now identify the condition by the more descriptive and less pejorative name.

Gender dysphoria is NOT the same as gender nonconformity, which refers to certain exhibited behaviors not matching the gender norms or stereotypes of the birth assigned gender (for example, girls behaving and dressing more like boys, or occasional cross-dressing in adult men). It is also NOT the same as being gay or lesbian.

Dan, who was born a female, describes how he remembers knowing that he was in the wrong body as early as the age of five or six. Of course he didn’t understand why he felt that way then, but he talks about how he prayed to God every night for years that that he would wake up as a boy. By middle school, the time when most boys and girls are entering puberty, the condition had become increasingly more traumatic and emotionally crippling for him, resulting from his internal feelings and identity, as well as numerous external social pressures.

It was not until eighth grade, when an understanding teacher showed a video about Caitlyn Jenner and explained what true transgenderism is, that Dan (then still using his female name) really began to understand why he had always felt the way he did. But, unfortunately, due mostly to continuing social pressures and fear of rejection, it was not until his sophomore year that he was able to confide his true feelings to some of his closest friends and begin to present himself in a more masculine way. In so doing, he was able to gain more personal confidence. In eleventh grade he changed his name to Daniel, and found, to his great relief, that the transition was not as worrisome as he thought it might be, due to the positive support of his teachers and the majority of his classmates.

Dan attributes his “mostly smooth” transition, in part, to the wide diversification of the people in the Greater Pottstown Area – not only from an ethnic perspective, but also the sociological and even the political diversification that people in this area exhibit. Dan describes how the amount of diversity among the people in the Pottstown area actually encourages most folks to listen to each other’s ideas, often discussing opposing viewpoints with a degree of acceptance that might not be possible somewhere else. He feels that he might not have become the confident young man he is proud to be today, in another area where most people think more similarly to one another. The Greater Pottstown Foundation salutes Dan’s well-worded reference to the inclusion and tolerance of our community which is all too often disparaged. He makes us all proud to be Greater Pottstownians.

UNDER THE GUN: Chesco DA Talks School Shootings, Why They Happen and How to Stop Them

Photos and video by Evan Brandt

Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan gave a presentation at Owen J. Roberts High School Wednesday night on school shootings, how to identify a shooter and what can be done to prevent them.

Many in the sparsely populated audience had never held a gun.

Many had never heard an AR-15 fired.

The guns were heavy, and the rifle crack was loud in the acoustically focused auditorium.

Take a listen on this video:



The occasion was a presentation on school shootings and how parents, teachers and even students can best protect themselves during a school shooting.

The presenters were Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan and Downingtown Police Detective Andy Trautmann.

They outlined what they have learned over the years, Hogan as an agent fighting terrorism before being elected district attorney and Trautmann as both a SWAT team commander and former School Resource Officer.

OJR parents hold a variety of deadly objects including guns, 

a hammer,and a bottle of prescription drugs during Wednesday's

presentation at Owen J. Roberts High School.

There are 360 million guns in the United States and only 325 million people so, as Hogan put it, "guns aren't going anywhere."

Guns are also simple and hardy tools, said Hogan, holding up a revolver and saying he could bury it in the ground for 70 years, dig it up, clean it off "and it would work fine."

School shooters are most often males, between the ages of 15 to 19, or 35 to 44.

Teen shooters usually have a grudge against a school and older men who become school shooters face pressures from work, family failed marriages, know they will not be a major league pitcher for the Phillies.

"This is the age when they realize, this is their life," said Hogan., adding that "once we reach 50, we are either more likely to be past those pressures, or learned to live with them."

Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan holds up a handgun.

An "active shooter," is someone who "wants to run the numbers up, get as high a body count as they possibly can," said Trautmann.

"A targeted shooter has a target in mind. Although they can turn into active shooters and they will shoot someone whop gets in their way," he said.

Many focus on high schools as targets, but when a shooter is not a student, the targets are usually "softer" targets like middle or elementary schools, said Hogan.

"High schools are full of teenage knuckleheads with hormones raging through their bodies who take big risks and are easily triggered," making them less attractive to an active shooter who does not have a grudge against a particular school, he said.

Police generally plan to face a single shooter when responding to a school shooting. Those involving more than one, tend to be stopped before they occur. "Give me five guys going to attack a school, and I guarantee you one of them will screw up," he said.

Hogan points to the parent holding a bottle of oxycodone and says
far more children will die from drug use than being shot in school.

Hogan noted that a year later, and the expending of no small amount of effort and resources, ""the FBI still have no idea why the shooter in Las Vegas did what he did."

Why Does it Happen?

School shootings have many causes, including copy cats and a desensitization to violence.

That happens most commonly in recent times as the result of "first-person shooter" games, said Hogan.

He described a murder case in which two men were fighting over a gun and a third man who was friends with one of the men carefully shot the one fighting with his friend.

"He drew his gun, aimed carefully and waited until he had his shot and hit his target, he waited and did it again, and again. He didn't have SWAT training, he was not in the military, he had learned it from playing video games," Hogan said.

"We've trained up a whole generation of trained shooters," he said.

Trautmann said he was amazed while serving as a School Resource Officer, how often teens came up to him to ask him about specific guns "and if I had ever shot one. They knew them all from their games," he said.

He said the games desensitize people to violence the same way military and police training does.

Downington Police Det. Andy Trautmann brought several guns
to Wednesday night's demonstration.

"They found in World War I that most soldiers just fired their guns, they didn't fire at or hit their
targets," he said.

By World War II and Korea, the military was training with more life-like targets "to desensitize them," said Trautmann. "It's the same thing we do in SWAT training."

Another factor is social media, said Hogan.

"Back when I was in school, two guys wanted to call each other names you know what happened. They had a fist fight and then they were done," Hogan said.

Now, however, social media abuse taunts teens in from of the whole school and can drag on for months.

(On the plus side, it does allow the authorities to intervene more quickly if its more visible.)

Another factor is that "kids are under more pressure than we were in school, they do more homework than we did in school" said Hogan. "When my daughter was in second grade, she was already talking about what college she was going to go to and she was not alone."

Trautmann said "it takes less than a second to shoot someone."
He said with a gun like the AR-15 he is holding,
he can fire 8 shots a second.

Most important to understand is there is no one single cause, said Hogan.

How Does a Shooter Become a Shooter?

The first phase of becoming a school shooter is the fantasy stage, Hogan said.

"They fantasize about the shooting and, if they post about it on social media, we can find out about it and stop it. Ninety-nine percent of them are stopped before they happen," he said.

The second stage if planning: the shooter thinks about how to sneak materials into school ahead of time, researching how you build a bomb.

The third stage is preparation. They may, for example, start shooting in the woods to improve their aim.

"When it's not hunting season, if you're hearing shots in the woods, you should absolutely call us and let us check it out," said Trautmann. "We would rather investigate 100 incidents that turn out to be nothing, than miss an opportunity to stop a school shooting."

"We had an eighth grader in Downingtown with floor plans of every school. He tried to buy ingredients for a thermite bomb, and he had Hitler's book Mein Kampf on his computer," said Trautmann. "He was stopped.Any time they have blue prints, you're in trouble."

The fourth phase is the approach stage, driving to school or hiding something in school during evening sports events.

Trautmann displays a handgun so small it can be fit into a belt buckle.

The fifth and final phase is once the shooting starts. "Ninety-nine percent of the time, it's stopped ahead of time and you never hear about," Hogan said.

What Can You Do?

The most important resource law enforcement has are the parents and members of the community, said Hogan. He urged parents to monitor their children's social media accounts, look at their phones at texts, emails and more, to search their rooms.

Very important is to lock up household guns. "We often find shooters get guns from homes, or friend's home, where guns are not locked up," hogan said.

Schools must train staff continuously and drill regularly so that, like fire drills, children will be safer. "The last time someone died in a school fire was the 1950s," Trautmann said.

Because police now train to enter as soon as possible, not to wait for the SWAT team, and to shoot anyone with a gun, Hogan said Chester County officials do not support arming teachers.

Trautmann said they are unlikely to train regularly enough to hit where they're aiming and are more likely to be shot by police.

Both said Owen J. Roberts has made one of the most important investments, in a school district police force and a head of security, and said schools must work to keep a balance between turning a school into a prison, and making it "a totally open campus."

You can learn more below in the Tweets from the presentation:

Gunfire at Owen J. Roberts High School

TESTING, TESTING: OJR Aims for Higher Scores

Photos by Evan Brandt

Dennis Fletcher, Owen J. Roberts High School math teacher, talks to the school board Monday night about the district's Keystone scores in algebra.

Headed to the Owen J. Roberts workshop meeting Monday because, sadly, it was the most interesting agenda out there.

And considering how uninteresting the meeting was, that's saying something.

Perhaps the most significant item had to do with the new $28 million East Coventry Elementary School, or perhaps more importantly, what comes next.

As it turns out, that building is the last item on a capital improvements plan from several years ago, and that means its time for a new one, and a feasibility study to help determine costs.

Although a committee has already been formed -- comprised of staff, school board members, parents and administrators -- the meetings are not open to the public.

But one meeting is, and it will be a Town Hall meeting held Nov. 1 at Owen J. Roberts High School. Other public meetings may be scheduled, but as of now, this will be the general public's only chance to have input.

Other than that, the bulk of the meeting was consumed by talking about the district's standardized test scores -- the PSSA, the Keystone and Advance Placement. They're all awfully good, but of course, they would like to make them better.

You can read all about that in the Tweets below:

Testing, testing

Region Picks Up $1M in 4-K State Funding Grants

Four early education programs in the Greater Pottstown Area have received an additional $1 million through the new state budget which remains unbalanced.

According to a spreadsheet of the grant awards provided by State Rep. Thomas Quigley, R-146th Dist. programs in Chester and Montgomery counties have received a total of $1,020,000 in Pennsylvania Pre-K Counts grants.

No grants were issued in Berks County.

Pre-K Counts provides quality half-day and full-day pre-kindergarten to eligible 3- and 4-year-olds and is designed for children who are at risk of school failure; living in families earning up to 300 percent of the federal income poverty level (such as a family of four earning $72,900); and, or who may also be English language learners or have special needs.

At $357,000, Pottstown School District received the region’s largest grant, which is in addition to the grant money it already receives from that program

Owen J. Roberts School District has received a grant of $170,000.

The two others issued in Montgomery County are for the county’s Intermediate Unit, which provides services throughout the county and received $340,000; and Montgomery Early Learning Centers, which has five locations, including one at Emanuel Lutheran Church in Pottstown, and which received $153,000.

Pottstown Schools Superintendent Stephen Rodriguez said he had not expected to receive word so soon, given the uncertain state of the budget, which has yet to be the benefit of a revenue package agreed to by Gov. Tom Wolf and the Pennsylvania General Assembly.

The upshot for Pottstown is the district can now offer a full day Pre-K Counts classroom at Franklin, Lincoln and Rupert elementary schools, in addition to the Barth 4K classroom that started last year.

The grant funding, combined with district funds, means the district can now offer a full-day 4K classroom experience to all families of 4-year-old children regardless of income, as long as they reside in Pottstown School District.

Rodriguez explained that during the last school year, a full-day 4-K program was set up at Barth Elementary School, but only had 20 seats, all of which were filled.

Now an additional 60 seats — 20 at each of the other three elementary schools — will be funded thanks to the grant

Kathryn Soeder, Assistant Superintendent at Owen J. Roberts School District said the district has taken advantage of the Pre-K Counts program for the last 10 years by passing the grant money through to programs at two locations run by Warwick Child Care.

The program offers child care and instruction “aligned with our kindergarten and pre-K program.

“We started with 20 seats, ten in each of Warick’s two locations, and added 20 more in 2016,” she said.

The additional $170,000 brings the district’s Pre-K Counts grant to $516,000 and will allow for services to be provided to 60 children from low-income families, she said.

The Rights Stuff

Molly Girard with Guidance Counselor and the Advisor 

for the Gay Straight Alliance Jen Arnst

With the news last week that the first same-sex couple to obtain marriage licenses in Pennsylvania hailed from and were issued licenses by Montgomery County, a national debate about marriage and equal rights for non-traditional couples has become a very local story.

But Loreen Bloodgood and Alicia Terrizzi are not the only people on the front line of this issue.

Molly Girard, who graduated in June from Owen J. Roberts High School, will be honored Aug. 8 at the National Libery Museum in Philadelphia as part of the the Young Heroes Award ceremony for her work pushing for more rights and understanding for lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, trans-gender citizens.

The award honors young people who have championed liberty through civic engagement, conflict resolution, promoting diversity and school or community leadership.

All winners receive recognition at an awards ceremony at the Museum; a certificate of recognition, medallion and gifts; and a plaque featuring their story in the Museum's Young Heroes Exhibit. 

Here is why she is being honored:

One of the most dedicated members of the Owen J. Roberts Gay Straight Alliance Club, Molly sits on the Executive Officer Board. 

According to her nomination, she has been a huge motivating force behind their ability to reach out to faculty in other schools. After a discussion with staff addressing anti-lgbt language and bullying, Molly and her peers arranged to visit other buildings to help educate staff about LGBT issues and sensitivity to differences. 

So far they've visited the middle school and all elementary schools in the district. 

They coordinated scheduling the visits and planning the presentations and training her peers on running break out portions of the workshop. 

Outside of school, Molly has promoted LGBTQ student equality and understanding and presented at the first annual Rainbow Connection Student Leadership Conference at West Chester University. She presented to student leaders from other high school GSA clubs there.