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TU staff, faculty, students and families spruce up Cherry Hill Elementary

Armed with paint brushes and wearing TU T-shirts, nearly 60 members of the TU community joined Mayor Martin O’Malley and his staff in refurbishing Cherry Hill Elementary School.

In the course of a single workday the TU crew was able to paint 19 classrooms and two hallways baby blue and pale yellow.

The one-day event was tied in to TU’s year-old Cherry Hill Learning Zone Initiative, a collaboration between Towson University (initiated by the College of Education) and the Baltimore City Public School System, the City of Baltimore and grassroots community organizations in the Southwest Baltimore neighborhood of Cherry Hill. The partnership will be formally launched on August 24 at the Cherry Hill Children’s Summit.

The idea for sprucing up Cherry Hill Elementary came about when Mayor O’Malley’s office asked TU if it would like to participate in the mayor’s Believe in Our Schools Campaign. For the past several years the campaign has brought together community volunteers and resources to make urgent improvements to some of Baltimore’s most needy schools.

“When we told the mayor’s staff about our unique relationship with the Cherry Hill neighborhood, they arranged for us to make improvements at Cherry Hill Elementary in time for the new school year,” explains Jennifer Gajewski, one of the event’s organizers and TU’s assistant to the president for government relations.

TU’s volunteers came from areas as varied as development, transportation, enrollment services, university police, athletics and the president’s office. Faculty from the colleges of liberal arts, health professions and education were also on the job, along with several TU students and children of staff members.

The Office of Technology Services was particularly well represented, with 10 staff members putting down their flash drives and picking up paint rollers. “By day’s end we got a lot of painting done and in the process had a great time getting better acquainted with each other,” says Matt Wynd, assistant director in information technology support services.

“Volunteering as part of a group representing the different facets of TU was immensely satisfying. Everyone in OTS was talking about it for days."

Story by Stuart Zang/Photos by Kanji Takeno

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