State OKs $39.7M for new Crocker School

City officials were excited to learn on Wednesday that the Massachusetts School Building Authority awarded a $ 39.7 million grant to replace the aging Crocker Elementary School in Fitchburg.

“ This is great news,” Mayor Stephen DiNatale said Wednesday after learning of the grant funding that will be used to offset the projected $ 65,032,984 price tag of the proposed new school, which will replace the existing school on the Crocker campus at 200 Bigelow Road.

One of the next steps is for the school district and MSBA to enter into a Project Funding Agreement, which will detail the project’s scope and budget along with the conditions under which the school district will receive the grant, according to a press release from the MSBA. “

Upon completion, this project will provide a new 21st century learning environment for students in Fitchburg , said State Treasurer Deborah Goldberg, who serves as the chair of the MSBA.

City and school officials have been working for several years to finalize the details of the new school’s construction and in March, they got their first look at the proposed building plans.

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Red Raiders the recipients of defibrillator

Every year around this time, WPKZ Radio (105.3 FM, AM 1280) and its Sunday morning high school sports show, the Scholastic Sports Zone, has given away an Automated External Defibrillator ( AED) to a Central Mass. school that needs one. After all, schools in the Commonwealth are required by law to have a certain number of AEDs for a certain amount of students, all part of Michael’s Law.

And for the second year in a row, the AED is going to a school in WPKZ’s ancestral coverage area. SSZ founder and host — and WPKZ sales manager — Howie Kahn announced recently that Fitchburg High School’s athletic department will be the recipient of this year’s AED, to be awarded at Worcester’s The Flying Rhino restaurant on Shrewsbury Street.

FHS received the AED, which will be stored at the Crocker Field clubhouse, last night. Ricciardi Brothers of Worcester is the prime sponsor of the giveaway.

“ On behalf of the Fitchburg Public Schools, we’re honored on accepting the gift of an AED for Crocker Field and the clubhouse. A small piece of their son will live in our historic clubhouse on the chance that we need to save a life,” FHS athletic director Craig Antocci said in a school statement.

“ Providing this life- saving piece of equipment to Fitchburg High’s athletic department is much needed and is a benefit to all the schools that have received them,” Kahn said. “ We’ve been giving these away since 2013, and through the generosity of the MTE Foundation and his parents, John and LuAnn Ellsessar. We feel the giveaway is part of the station’s mission to support the communities in our expanded coverage area, and we’ll continue to do this as long as we can.”

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Harvard-bound grad asks high school to give her $40,000 award to a community college student

Verda Tetteh used her graduation speech to talk about resilience. “Because if we’re being honest with ourselves, some of us were born with the odds stacked against us,” she told more than 200 fellow seniors at Fitchburg High School in Fitchburg,
Mass., where most students are deemed “economically disadvantaged.”

“To every immigrant child, you can make it,” she said, crying. Tetteh, whose family is from Ghana, certainly had — securing a prestigious state scholarship and admission to Harvard while juggling work at the grocery store during a pandemic. Later at last Friday’s graduation she got her school’s highest honor: a “General Excellence” award that came with $40,000.

Tetteh beamed onstage for a quick picture in her maroon cap and gown, then headed back to her seat. The ceremony went on. But as the assistant principal wrapped up his address, Tetteh made her way back to the podium for something unscripted.

She’d been listening to school leaders espouse “being selfless and being bold,” she said. She hoped that administrators would consider giving her award money to someone going to a community college like the one that helped her mom.

“I am so very grateful for this, but I also know that I am not the one who needs this the most,” she said.

Out on the grass, her classmates rose from their folding chairs to cheer. It was her second standing ovation that day.

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” principal Jeremy Roche told The Washington Post on Tuesday.

When Tetteh came up to speak again, he thought that maybe it was a part of a joke. Soon, he was glad he wasn’t next on the lineup — he isn’t sure if he could have managed the words.

Tetteh was sharing her hard-earned success with others after a particularly punishing year that has thrown the American education system’s inequalities into new relief: straining families, sending students home to learn in wildly different circumstances and pushing low-income students to drop out amid already uneven access to an expensive commodity: college education. To Roche, his student’s surprise move was a counterpoint to the “bad rap” sometimes given to young people — a testament to the kind of kids at Fitchburg High, he said, and schools around the country.

“She represented the class and the school amazingly well, and I would even dare say, her generation,” he said.

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Fitchburg softball field to bear name of legendary coach

It lies dormant right now, the bats and balls put away until next March. But when the Fitchburg High softball team next takes the field, it will not be an unnamed part of a combined softball and soccer complex on the Arn- How Farm Road campus.

It will be named after the grandfather of the sport at FHS.

Thanks to an unanimous vote of the Fitchburg School Committee Monday night, the softball field will be renamed after longtime Red Raiders softball and girls’ basketball coach Tony Alario.

Former FHS softball coach Mike Pelland, who helped spearhead the facility’s renaming — which will be the first- ever to be named after an FHS girls coach and is expected to occur in late July or early August, depending on Alario’s family’s availability — along with fellow former FHS softball coach Tim O’Brien, said Tuesday the honor is a long time coming for a man who gave so much of himself to Red Raider athletics.

Read more here.