On Thursday, May 23, I had the opportunity to travel to Towanda, PA to the 10th Annual Meeting of the Community Foundation for the Twin Tiers to talk about the Darlene J. Sitler Memorial Scholarship Fund that I helped found with three friends from high school. The above link is the newspaper article written about the Meeting.
Below is the text of my speech, in case you're interested in reading what I said.
The first time I met Darlene Sitler
was during the first week of kindergarten. She was in her second year of teaching music in the Northern
Potter School District, and as I shuffled into the Library-slash-Art
Room-slash-Music Room at Harrison Valley Elementary, Ms. Sitler greeted us with
a great big smile.
That’s the first thing I remember
about Ms. Sitler. She was this
petite woman with curly brown hair, big, almond-shaped eyes, and one of the
best smiles in the history of forever.
Even during that first music class, it was impossible not to notice and
be carried away by Ms. Sitler’s warmth, enthusiasm, energy, and love for
music. I didn’t know the word when
I was in kindergarten, but Ms. Sitler was a dynamo.
Those first few weeks of
kindergarten were really eventful for me and my class, and that is in no small
part due to Ms. Sitler. Not long
into the schoolyear, Ms. Sitler brought along the Big Box of Musical
Instruments that contained sand blocks, jingle bells, wood blocks and mallets,
and metal triangles with strikers.
Looking back on this twenty-nine years later and as an adult, this was
nothing less than a show of Courage.
By all accounts, even early on, the fledgling Class of 1996 was a wild
and rowdy bunch of hooligans, and here Ms. Sitler was, willingly handing over a
big box of noise to us.
We were shown how to play each kind
of percussion instrument in that box, but Ms. Sitler took special care when she
taught us how to extract a sweet sound from the triangles, sharply and
decisively striking one of the open metal arms of the triangle, not going
around and around the inside of the triangle like we’d seen on Little House on
the Prairie and any western our parents would let us watch.
After demonstrating the triangle to
us and making us PROMISE we’d play them PROPERLY, which of COURSE we did, she
passed them out, and one of the boys in my class who’d already made one trip
through kindergarten and who should have known better than to behave this way
in front of a gaggle of impressionable rookie kindergarteners took his striker
and ran it around and around the inside of that triangle and called out
“DIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNERRRRRRRRR!”
And of course the rest of us
followed his example.
Ms. Sitler sank down on her piano
bench and stifled a wry grin.
“There’s one in every crowd,” she
muttered. And she let us get our
triangle terror out of our systems, after which we were more receptive to
playing them ‘her’ way!
Ms. Sitler loved the holidays, and
always built up our excitement for them by building her lessons around songs
for the holiday. Her Christmas
concerts were legendary, but it was a Halloween song that she’d sing that made
a particular impression on me. It
was a quiet, almost soothing song about an old woman, all skin and bones who
lived down by an old graveyard, and Ms. Sitler would strum along on an autoharp
until the song’s abrupt end, when she’d just drag her fingers over the
autoharp’s strings and make it scream while she said “BOO!”
The first time I heard that song as
a kindergartener, I jumped right out of my plastic chair. I wasn’t the only one. She’d sing that song to us every
Halloween, and it didn’t matter how many times I’d heard it or how old I’d
gotten. I’d jump every time!
Over the years, whether it was in
music class or band and chorus, or when she’d chaperone a field trip, Ms.
Sitler was a sparkling presence. She
had an easy and contagious laugh.
She greeted the day-to-day with a ready sense of humor. She had an uncanny ability to know when
a kid needed a gentle push, or a well-timed word of encouragement. There was no need or real place for
ruthless competition in her music room.
Ms. Sitler strove to teach us that one voice is powerful enough, but the
voices of many working together can bring down walls and move mountains.
After every band or chorus
rehearsal, no matter how sour our notes or how off our rhythm was that day, Ms.
Sitler would always call out “Excellent Rehearsal!” It took me years to understand what she meant: rehearsals
are for learning and making ourselves better, not to play everything
perfectly. “Excellent Rehearsal!”
indeed!
On December 2, 2012, Ms. Sitler was
taken too soon from this world, and the news of how she died went around the
world in a flash. The Associated
Press picked up the story, and soon it was all over the Internet. Ms. Sitler had been reduced to “the
lady who was shot by her ex-husband while playing the organ for church,” and
that seemed to be a grave injustice in my mind.
I was not alone. The day after Ms. Sitler’s passing, I
awoke to find a message in my Facebook inbox from Melinda Martin, a woman who
was a couple years behind me in school.
She lives in Taiwan now, and wondered if I could help her set up a
one-time memorial scholarship for Ms. Sitler. I told her I would do what I could, but admitted I didn’t
know where to begin. Before the
panicky “what am I gonna DO to help her?” feeling could settle in, Melinda had
gotten in touch with a classmate of hers, Mike Thompson, and Mike in turn
brought Matt Reed aboard. We’re
all fairly far-flung geographically, and in those early days, and I do mean
early- two days after Ms. Sitler’s passing, the only things the four of us
really had in common were that we all graduated from Northern Potter in the
mid-to-late 1990s, and that we all wanted to do something to honor Ms. Sitler,
and to help ensure that she is remembered for the way she lived, for the way
she inspired and encouraged us.
By Wednesday, December Fifth, 2012,
Melinda, Mike, Matt, and I decided that we were going to form a scholarship
committee, and instead of a one-time memorial scholarship, we wanted something
that would have permanence. We all
felt as though we had been blessed and honored to have been able to be in Ms.
Sitler’s music classes, that we were better people for having known her, that
each of her students had been touched by a light she had, and now that she
isn’t here anymore to pass that light on herself, it’s fallen to us to do so
for her.
The thing was, we had good
intentions and very little know-how by that Wednesday. The four of us got together to chat
over Google Hangouts, which is a lot like Skype, and it was both relieving and
alarming to know that all four of us were feeling the same panicky pebble in
the pits of our stomachs. Mike,
the man who would emerge to be the Captain of our Scholarship, had gotten us
some forms to fill out about incorporating as a not-for-profit organization,
and we’d each dutifully printed out those forms and began filling them in, and as
we were talking on our Internet chat that day, one of us broke the ice with
“working with the IRS scares the daylights out of me,” and Melinda, the heart
and soul of our committee said that she was certainly feeling “daunted.” We all agreed that this was far, far
out of the comfort zone for any of us, but we managed to come up with the
skeleton of a charter, and we wrote a mission statement that evening over our
Internet chat. Because I’m the
most local of the four of us, I was charged with heading to the bank the next
day, to see what a group does when they want to set up a scholarship fund in
honor of someone.
I didn’t sleep at all that night.
I’m no stranger to the bank. I’m no stranger to setting up a
corporation. While we were still
in our mid-twenties, my husband and I bought a dental practice, set up an S-corp
with the considerable help of our accountant and our lawyer, and we’ve enjoyed successful
business for nearly a decade. But I remember that even in setting up an
S-corp, there were lots of draconian tax laws and Things to Know, and paying
the accountant and the lawyer to help us navigate those waters was expensive
enough for a rookie business owner.
For a group of four friends who
just wanted to set up a memorial scholarship for a treasured teacher, it
wasn’t just “daunting,” it was darn near impossible.
The next morning, I was getting my
toddler bundled up to head to Ulysses to the bank to see what I could find out
about all of this, when the phone rang.
It was the receptionist at my husband’s dentist’s office, and she said
Ben Olney had just called and was looking for me. I got so excited I jumped up and down, startling the toddler,
and I screamed into the phone, alarming our usually-unflappable
receptionist.
I was so thrilled because while I
was zipping up my daughter’s coat, it had occurred to me that I ought to stop
in to the funeral home while I was in Ulysses, because of anyone in town, Ben
Olney ought to know a thing or two about setting up memorial scholarships, or
memorial funds, or would know where to steer me, Melinda, Mike, and Matt.
I don’t know how Ben found out about
what we were up to, or how he heard about our plans to form a scholarship
committee for Ms. Sitler. I’m sure
it was more a product of living in a small town, and not magic, but that day,
hearing about the Community Foundation for the Twin Tiers, and everything that
organization does certainly felt like magic, because it was exactly what we
needed, at exactly the right time.
I wrote down as fast as I could everything Ben told me about the
Community Foundation for the Twin Tiers, and was so excited about what I found
out that I really had to modulate that energy when I told the rest of the
scholarship committee about the Community Foundation, so that I wasn’t talking
at warp-speed, and not yelling into the computer microphone.
After a few days of deliberating
amongst ourselves, we decided that the Community Foundation for the Twin Tiers
is exactly the organization we should work with, because all the hard work is
done for us. The CFTT already has
tax-exempt status. There are
systems in place, precedents already set. Working with the CFTT ensures that no administrative
detail falls through a crack and that the people who donate dollars to our Fund
are able to use their generous donations to their benefit at tax time. Once we sat down and took into consideration
everything that the Community Foundation does for our Fund, the administrative
fees are a bargain.
I won’t say that if it weren’t for
the Community Foundation for the Twin Tiers, the Darlene J. Sitler Memorial
Scholarship would not have happened.
But I can say with certainty that we would not be as far ahead as we are
today. Because we know that the
Community Foundation is taking care of all our administrative needs, we’re able
to keep our minds on raising funds for our Scholarship, and to keep our minds
and hearts on the mission of the Darlene J. Sitler Memorial Scholarship Fund:
We seek to honor the person Darlene
Sitler was and turn the focus away from the way she died and put the spotlight
back on the way she lived, the way she instructed, inspired, and
encouraged. We plan to give our
scholarship each year to a student graduating from Northern Potter High School who
has participated in the music program and who plans to attend college to become
a teacher. While we would be
thrilled to award our scholarship to a future music teacher, our scholarship
committee believes that someone can take to heart the lessons learned in a
music class or in band and chorus and use them to instruct, inspire, and
encourage students at any level, in any field.
During her life and career,
Ms. Sitler touched thousands of lives with her determination, strength of
character, and enthusiasm. Now
it’s up to us to pass her light into the future, and the Community Foundation
for the Twin Tiers is helping us do just that.
