On January 26, the Oak Park Women’s Guild is hosting a movie fundraiser in honor of local resident Kathleen O’Bryan Kurrle. Kathleen was born and raised in Oak Park and has been fighting a long battle against Stage IV metastatic breast cancer that, when discovered in 2008, had already spread to her liver and bones, and, eventually, her brain. Attached is information about the event. The organization would appreciate anything you can do to help spread the word about it.

FLYER

Here’s to Irving School

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2013 10:00 PM

Come summer, District 97 will start in on renovations of the final four elementary school playgrounds. Whittier, Hatch, Mann and Irving schools will get the upgrades. We’re excited because we understand that a great playground is essential to a school and its neighborhood.

Oak Park voters agreed with that idea a couple of years ago when they OK’d a tax hike referendum for the grade schools by a notable margin. In that campaign, the district pledged that a vote in the affirmative would lead to continued support of arts and music curriculum, a long-delayed investment in the basic systems of the school buildings, and an investment in technology and in playgrounds.

While some revisionists have suggested that new playgrounds are a luxury and that the school board is throwing around taxpayer funding casually, we disagree. We’re getting just what the school board promised, and we believe in the power of recess, of exercise, of social learning on a playground.

What we are most excited about is that finally Irving School is going to get rid of that dangerous and hideous ocean of blacktop that defines the school for anyone passing by along Ridgeland Avenue. By fall there will be a new playground and a soccer field. The project will be completed with funding from the school district, the Irving PTO, and, we’re confident, the park district. Now that’s a collaboration.

We’ve got a long memory and what we remember are the decades when Irving, down in southeast Oak Park, was the forgotten school in the District 97 system. It’s where older teachers went to earn out their pensions, where principals stayed too long or didn’t last long, where an acre of asphalt was considered an adequate playground.

Over the past decade-plus, Irving and its community have shaken off that stigma through hard work, true partnership between parents and the school, overdue district support and an activism in the wider neighborhood, which now sees Irving as the deserved and essential anchor of a vital community.

If there is a better place in Oak Park to spend a million bucks we don’t know what it would be. Here’s to Irving School and its new playground.

—
SEOPCO – South East Oak Park Community Organization
P.O. Box 1722
Oak Park, IL 60304-1722
www.seopco.org
seopco@gmail.com

KIDS CARING FOR KIDS

Join us in making decorations for Shriners Hospital’s

Children’s Valentine’s Day Party

Banners, cards, tissue flowers, and more!

THURSDAY, JANUARY 17th

3:30-4:30pm

Oak Park Main Library, Children’s Storytime Room

BOOK DRIVE

We’re collecting books, too!

Bring in new or gently used books for kids ages 6-16.

We’ll also be accepting new coloring books and crayons.

Shriners Hospital is located just north of Oak Park in Chicago. This location

is a 60-bed pediatric orthopaedic, spinal cord injury and cleft lip and palate

hospital. You can learn more about them at shrinershospitalsforchildren.org.

The Neighborhood Giving Project will be delivering all of your decorations and

book donations to the patients at Shriners before Valentine’s Day.

Thank you for helping us brighten a young patient’s day!

FLYER

—
Deb Abrahamson
Executive Director
Oak Park Education Foundation
dabrahamson@op97.org
www.opef.org
(708) 524-3023 phone

The Park District has generously offered free classes to PTO members involved with their school gardens. If you have an interest in working with the Irving garden, either this year or in the future, but you’d feel more comfortable by taking  one of these classes to better prepare, please email Laura Crawford, lauracrawford47@gmail.com, to sign up.

Note that you don’t have to be an expert gardener to help out in the Irving garden; anyone is welcome!

The free Park District classes are:

1.      Vegetable Gardening on Saturday, March 2, 9 and 16 from 9 am to 11 am. This will cover all the basics from soil preparation and vegetable selection to vegetable harvesting.

2.      Start Your Own Seeds on Saturday, March 23 from 9 am to 11 am.  How to purchase seed, when and how to germinate it and how to grow seedlings on to garden-ready plants.