When you’re on campus for Homecoming next month (Oct 1-2 – you are coming, right?), you’ll notice that Hale Building has a different look. Over the past couple of months, it’s undergone a landscape renovation project to meet current ADA requirements for handicapped accessibility, improve pedestrian routing to newly located city crosswalks on the Main and Winchester street roundabout, and strengthen links with the recently completed Alumni Center.

The project helps establish the first of seven campus portals (entryways) recommended by the Facility Planning Committee and designated to improve  public accessibility and unify the public streetscape appearance. The landscape is being updated and valuable plantings will be preserved, while some of the  overgrown shrubs will be removed and the planting beds re-worked. Here’s a drawing of what the Hale landscaping should look like when it’s all done.

Bottom line? It enhances the elegance of this historic building, even before the grass has come in.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan was on campus on Monday night, August 30, and met with several teacher education students. KSC was the only institution of higher education that Sec. Duncan visited in the state, and several news outlets covered the event, including the New York Times,  the Keene Sentinel, the Nashua Telegraph, and the U.S. Department of Education.

If you missed his visit, we’ve posted a video that’s almost as good as being there.

The Alumni Association helped host the first campus-wide Legacy Scavenger Hunt on Friday, August 27, as part of Orientation. This activity provided a fun, interactive way for students to learn about some of the important resources on campus, as well as some of Keene State’s history and traditions. Over 50 alumni, staff, and faculty members participated in a variety of ways: planning the activity, giving information to students at one of the 34 locations across campus, and providing information for alumni profiles that were set up in the Alumni Center. The event went really well and allowed us to bring over 1,100 first-year students into the Alumni Center to celebrate their first few days on campus and as part of the KSC community!

A driving force for excellence in training mathematics teachers at Keene State and internationally for over 20 years, Dr. Beverly Ferrucci, professor of mathematics, received the Alumni Association’s 2010 Distinguished Teacher Award during New Student Convocation on August 26.

Read all about it on our news page. If you’ve had the honor of sitting in this excellent professor’s class, drop her a comment.

Talk about going forth to serve! Sadie Stone ’07, is in her second year with AmeriCorps NCCC and leading her own nine-member team, Wolf 3. So far, she’s trained as a woodland firefighter, worked on the Mississippi Gulf Coast with Habitat for Humanity, fought invasive species in the Delaware National Estuarine Research Reserve, rebuilt and finished homes for elderly/disabled families who were victims of contractor fraud in New Orleans, and moved President Calvin Coolidge’s personal artifacts from his attic to a new museum and cleared and weeded hedgerows at the President Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site in Plymouth, Vt. – and that’s just a sampling.

As of her last report, she was in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, living at a church and working at the Bay Area Food Bank sorting and compiling 40-pound boxes of food for families living in 22 counties stretching across Alabama, Mississippi and the Florida panhandle.

Selfless service like hers deserves an encouraging word – drop her a line via the “comments” link, por favor.

Here’s a new puzzle for anyone who’s spent much time on campus. Each month we’ll post a photo of something most KSC alums and students – and parents who visit regularly – should have seen somewhere in the KSC environs. Your task is to figure out where the photo was taken, or what it is of, and be the first to give us the correct answer. Your first challenge:

This, and other images as we add them, are on display in our Where’d I See That? gallery. If you think you have the answer, write it in the margin of a $100 dollar bill and mail it to Newsline, Alumni Center, Keene State College, Keene, NH, 03435-1502, or use the “Comments” link below.

The Reflections project, a collaboration between Keene State, Franklin Pierce University, The Historical Society of Cheshire County (Alan Rumrill), Cheshire TV, The Keene Sentinel, and the Keene Public Library (executive producers Nancy Vincent and Sally Miller), has won the Oral History Association’s 2010 Elizabeth B. Mason Small Project Award, given to recognize an outstanding oral history project.

The project team conducted interviews with key people on selected subjects and developed a series of documentaries based on the interviews, which Cheshire TV videotaped.  This resulted in five documentaries: The Hurricane of 1938, Rail Travel in the Monadnock Region, Pisgah: A Place Apart, The Cheshire County Complex, and Textile Mills in the Monadnock Region. Each premiered at the Colonial Theater and appeared on Cheshire TV.

Did you miss any? DVDs of the documentaries are on sale through the Historical Society of Cheshire County.

More information.

You’ve heard the old saying, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” KSC alum Marcus Soutra ’06 has certainly done just that, and his very special brand of lemonade is helping learning disabled (LD) students on campus and at local schools.

Diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD (attention deficit hyperactive disorder) in third grade, Marcus had a tough time in school because he just couldn’t learn normally or meet the classroom expectations. “I just didn’t feel good about who I was, because, at a very young age, I’d been told I was disabled,” he remembered. “I looked normal, and felt intelligent, but once I got into the classroom, I felt disabled.”

Fortunately, Marcus had supportive parents and a few understanding teachers along the way, and he made it to Keene State, quite an accomplishment for a LD student. His first year here was rocky, though, because he was ashamed of his disability and didn’t want anyone to know about it. But then he met people such as Jane Warner, director of Disability Services, who helped him get the right accommodations for his needs. “I started to realize that my LD wasn’t such a terrible thing because I could get help with it and do fine in school. My grades started to rise and my self esteem did too.”

Marcus majored in secondary education and social studies. He attended a seminar while he was student teaching and ran into Steve Bigaj, the associate dean of Professional Studies, who told Marcus about Project Eye-to-Eye, an organization that uses college students with LD to mentor younger kids with LD. “I read Jonathan Mooney’s [the Eye-to-Eye cofounder’s] book, Learning Outside the Lines, and it was basically my story,” Marcus recalled. “I thought, ‘I’ve got to bring this to Keene, because students here need to know about it; people in the community need this kind of help.’ So after graduation, I started coming up here and running Eye-to-Eye once a week.”

Marcus went on to become the national program director of Project Eye-to-Eye, where he’s responsible for managing and cultivating chapters nationwide. There are now 30 chapters in 16 states, and Marcus manages half of those chapters. Locally, Eye-to-Eye works with kids at Franklin Elementary School and the Jonathan M. Daniels School.

In 2007, Marcus, along with Amber Bergeron ’07, founded Camp Vision here at KSC, a week-long summer camp where counselors and kids can come together to build self esteem, the most important foundation for successful learning. The Camp, built on proven Eye-to-Eye principles, benefits both counselors and kids. “We’re finding that the role of being a mentor is as transformative in a person’s life as being mentored,” Marcus said. Both parties are struggling, and both need help. The mentors get a big boost from helping someone navigate similar challenges, and the kids, who often feel like they are doomed to failure in the classroom, are delighted to meet a cool college student who’s overcome LD and achieved success.