Alumni called home
Lee Procida | The Sun
The Lenape School District recently kicked off an extensive effort to reach out to its alumni and maintain closer connections with the thousands of graduates from its four schools.
This Alumni Ambassador Project includes trying to track down the 13,000 students with diplomas from Cherokee High School since 1978. But Joe Laufer, the district’s director of alumni fairs, views this ambitious goal as invaluable for the several district schools. It’s rare for public schools to do what we’re doing,” he said. So we feel we’re on the cutting edge of maintaining a viable alumni association.”
The goal of the project is to involve alumni more with the district’s educational initiatives. The idea is that quality education makes communities healthier, safer and more prosperous, so alumni can support their communities by supporting their schools. Hence the slogan: Advocate, Participate, Maintain and Sustain.”
Laufer thought the best way to kick off the project was a mini all-school reunion” at Cherokee on Feb. 2. Approximately 100 alumni attended, half of whom were teachers from the district, and Laufer admits it was difficult to find a good time to hold the event. Nevertheless, Laufer said the event was only a starting point for an extensive effort he started when hired in 2000. Since then, he has organized a comprehensive database of district alumni that is now used to organize class reunions.
The district also revamped its four official alumni Web sites, which already have more than 15,000 registered members of the over 50,000 alumni out there. Chris Gehringer, a Cherokee alumnus, designed the sites after the district approached him to help.
Since then Gehringer has started a business, Alumni Channel, for which he builds alumni web pages for high schools. He has built pages for more than 30 schools, including Camden Catholic, Willingboro, Paulsboro, Palmyra and Rancocas Valley.
He said the fact that so few public schools make efforts to contact alumni is both a gift and a curse for his business: there is so much potential to do something, but some schools are so used to doing nothing they do not want to start.
Lenape is one of the first school districts that I’m aware of that’s doing an actively engaged initiative to actually involve alumni somehow,” he said.
The four official sites are: LenapeAlumni.org, ShawneeAlumni.org, CherokeeAlumni.org and SenecaAlumni.net. There are unofficial sites with .com extensions, also, but the district does not sanction them.
Laufer would like to see alumni coming back to the schools to talk about their careers, to see more of them vote on the budget each year and support the various initiatives the district undertakes.
He wants more to come to reunions and wants to give courtesy cards out so they can come to plays and shows at discount rates.
To do that, Laufer is now trying to get a hold of someone from each graduating class and have them reach out to their classmates. The theory is if he has one person from each class aware of the program, then the effort can branch out from there to recruit as many alumni as possible.
We feel that, as alumni, they have a sense of gratitude from the education they received,” he said. Usually graduates join the alumni association of their college, though, and not their high school. We’re trying to get them involved here as well.”
Alumni interested in joining the program are asked to sign up on the Web sites or contact Laufer at jlaufer@lrhsd.org.