Latest news with #Leyden
Chicago Tribune
24-06-2025
- General
- Chicago Tribune
Leyden High School's 100th birthday grabs national attention
A big anniversary usually calls for a big celebration, but it's not often the celebration itself wins national awards. But that happened this year when Leyden High School District 212 won national recognition with two awards for its 100th year bash. The National School Public Relations Association awarded the district's communications team a Golden Achievement Award for the year-long centennial celebration and an Award of Excellence for the documentary video series the team did as part of the anniversary project. Both awards will be given July 23 at a celebration in Washington, D.C. The celebration kicked off last fall to coincide with the founding of the school in 1924 and it ran the duration of the school year, with homecoming events, a gala fundraiser and a family picnic in May. Besides the events, the school district produced signs, a mobile exhibit of historic school artifacts and created a five-part documentary series exploring the stories and the people from the school's history. Karen Geddeis, the district's director of communications, said she wanted the ambitious project to celebrate and commemorate, as any anniversary might. But she also wanted the year to celebrate community partnerships with the district and to raise funds for the school. In other words, she wanted the celebration to remind the community that the district still needed local support. 'We wanted to raise additional funds for our Leyden scholarship foundation and we also had so many community partners,' she said. 'People really love Leyden. Our businesses and our community is really amazing. We knew it was there and this was a moment to really see and formalize those partnerships.' Geddeis has been with the district five years, and she always knew the community supported the school. But this project really illustrated how much the school cares about its students and its legacy, and how many of those students, and graduates, still love their alma mater. She said she and her communication team worked for about a year planning for the event, and all along the way, as the project grew in scope, she had help. 'It's not very normal,' Geddeis said of the size of the celebration. 'This was very ambitious.' Maybe the crown jewel of the celebration was the documentary series, available on the district's YouTube channel. Each five-minute episode of 'Leyden: Making History' focuses on a person or people — the oldest alumni, coaching legends, graduates. And each video demanded hours of footage as well as an entire custom-built soundstage for interviews. Luckily, Geddeis wasn't working alone and she credits her two-person production crew for their long hours spent on the documentary. 'We knew video would play a role,' she said. 'We weren't really sure what that would look like and we knew we wanted to capture stories of our students, staff and our alumni.' One of the video production specialists, Brandon Delgado, is a 2018 graduate of Leyden. He said working on the 'Leyden: Making History' series meant a lot to him both as a video professional and because of his history with the district. 'This was special because we were going deep in the history but we didn't want to do just a timeline,' he said. 'We wanted to put together something that resonated with the viewers.' For this, he was eager to dig deep and spend more time with subjects and spend more time in the editing bay. 'We actually built a set,' he explained. 'We booked our theater for a week and we brought out all these artifacts from Leyden's history.' As it happened, all the subjects were more than happy to sit for hours and hours of interviews. In total, the documentaries were whittled down to about 30 minutes total from 12 hours of footage, which itself was a big feat. 'It felt like such a monumental thing, and something that many districts would not be capable of,' Geddeis said.
Yahoo
26-03-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Wildlife rehabilitators rescue stranded turtles at Berks lake
Amanda Leyden carefully probed through the layers of silt lining the banks of Crystal Lake, looking for hibernating turtles. Leyden, a licensed wildlife rehabilitator and clinic director of Aark Wildlife Rehabilitation and Education Center, Chalfont, Bucks County, spent much of Friday and Saturday searching the dry lakebed in Carsonia Park. The 27-acre property in Exeter and Lower Alsace townships is owned by the Mount Penn Borough Municipal Authority, which harnesses water from the site to supply about 30,000 households in Mount Penn, St. Lawrence, Lower Alsace and part of Exeter. The 10-acre lake recently was drained by the authority as part of a nearly $700,000 state and federal grant-funded project aimed at improving water quality for residents of the Antietam Valley. The project resulted in the accidental loss of about 100 fish and 30 or more turtles. Leyden was on site last week to rescue any remaining aquatic reptiles. She was joined by Nick Brewster, Aark's director of education, and several volunteers, including Lori Lilley of Mount Penn. Lilley, a self-described wildlife lover, reached out to the nonprofit center after seeing dead turtles and fish on the dry lakebed in videos posted on social media. With the authority's permission, the crew pulled on their waders and got to work. 'Even if I save one turtle, it will make me happy,' Lilley said. By early afternoon Saturday, they had found three alive. Heavy equipment spreads silt from Crystal Lake at Carsonia Park onto af former baseball field near the lake. (BILL UHRICH/READING EAGLE) The lake restoration project, begun in November, was designed by Liberty Environmental of Reading in consultation with the state Department of Environmental Protection. It includes work to protect underground aquifers, including the removal of accumulated sediment and debris from the lake bottom and installation of water quality units. It also includes a series of storm-sewer management measures, including planted swales, a sediment catcher, repairs and modifications to the lake spillway and the planting of native species to reduce shoreline erosion. The plan called for measures to preserve the aquatic life disrupted by the construction, said Joseph Boyle, chairman of the authority. Hampered by delays Had lowering of the lake started on schedule, he said, few, if any, animal lives would have been lost. Work was set to begin last summer but was delayed, Boyle said. Then, before construction could begin, Hurricane Helene hit on Sept. 26, causing destruction and flooding across the southeastern U.S. where the contractor, Flyway Excavation, Mount Joy, Lancaster County, was working. The company, which specializes in environmental work, was chosen from five bidders and was highly recommended by area conservation groups, he noted. The hurricane pushed the start date to October and then to November, Boyle said. 'So now we're getting into the winter months,' he said. Heavy equipment spreads silt from Crystal Lake at Carsonia Park in an area that will be planted as a pollinator garden. (BILL UHRICH/READING EAGLE) As the water was lowered, hundreds of fish were netted and relocated to a private pond, the only option after authorities refused to permit their release into the Schuylkill River or other publicly owned bodies of water, he said. About 15 turtles were recovered and moved to the banks of Antietam Creek. Then it got cold. The freezing temperatures interrupted the rescue effort, stranding and trapping the remaining fish and turtles in the ice and mud. Had the project started on schedule, Brewster said, the turtles would not have been in hibernation, and they would have followed the water as it receded to a small, spring-fed area about 10 feet deep. The problem, he said, is that turtles are built for swimming, not walking. With much of the lakebed now only mud, they are forced to walk to the remaining water. Many get stuck in the mud or exhaust themselves from the effort and die, he said. Much of what looks like mud on the lakebed is actually sediment and decaying excrement, Boyle said. In the last 40 years, he said, the lake has been heavily damaged by storm water runoff, pollution from non-native migratory geese, litter and other contaminants. Removal of sediment from the lake bottom will return its depth to about 10 feet from the current reduced depth of about 3 feet, he said. The harvested sediment will be used to build up a section of the lake's east end to form a wetland area that will strain storm water flow. Boyle, who teaches earth sciences and global geography at Daniel Boone High School, said the project's objective includes source-water protection and best practices for storm water management and restoration of the lake and wetlands habitat. The restored habitat is expected to encourage native plant and animal species and become a resource for wildlife watching and education, he said. Plans are to restock the lake with native fish in summer 2026. Native turtles, other reptiles and amphibians should naturally repopulate with time, he said. Leyden said there could still be live turtles in the mud. 'We are hoping as the weather warms, they will make their way out,' she said. State law requires that any reptiles rescued by the group be held at the rehab center until May 1, she said.
