Chester Children’s Chorus director John Alston and six teenaged sopranos are sitting under a canopy outside the chorus’s Park Avenue office in Swarthmore. Their metal folding chairs, draped with jackets and purses, are spaced 6 feet apart. This is only their second in-person rehearsal since COVID-19 shut them down in March. “When we shut down,” Alston recalls, “we were the best choir we’ve ever been. We had never sung with so much polish, understanding, and confidence.”
Market Manager Andy Rosen is thrilled that his team has been able to run the market safely in the midst of the pandemic. Even with vendors and shoppers in masks — and even though lingering to chat is discouraged — people have reported feeling a sense of community at the market.
The Wallingford-Swarthmore School Board selected Matthew Sullivan to fill the vacant board position in Region 2 at its September 29 meeting. Four candidates, including a physician and a recent graduate of Strath Haven High School, put themselves forward for the post. Sullivan replaces Damon Orsetti who resigned last month.
What are the Swarthmore Police Department’s policies and procedures? When are officers permitted to use force? If they do, how do they report it, and to whom? Are officers trained in de-escalation? Swarthmore resident Virginia Adams O’Connell attended borough council’s Public Safety Committee meeting last week to talk about ways to answer these and similar questions for the Swarthmore community.
Mushroom strudel. Citrus-cured salmon. “Duck duet” risotto. Those were some of the dishes on the menu when Village Vine, Swarthmore’s first-ever wine bar and bistro, celebrated its grand opening last week. On the wine list: selections from Italy, Turkey, Chile, and upstate New York, among many other places. For owners Lori Knauer and Jill Gaieski, opening day was a long time coming.
We’ve been hearing a lot of questions about how to vote in the November 3 election. The Swarthmorean has assembled some information that we hope will help you choose your voting method (in-person, by mail, using a drop box, or at a new Voter Service Center), and then vote efficiently.
School buildings will open in October. And athletic competition will soon resume. Those were the main results of the three-and-a-half hour meeting of the Wallingford-Swarthmore School District board on Monday night. Votes on both questions were 7-1, with board member Marylin Huff voting against.
Rose Valley’s Hedgerow has an advantage during COVID-19 that most theaters don’t: the company lives together. “We can keep working actually next to each other,” Reed says. “As opposed to something on a Zoom call you’re going to splice together.” Reed and his company are taking advantage of that proximity to reinvent themselves — temporarily, anyway — as online storytellers.
Will school buildings reopen later this month? Maybe. The Wallingford-Swarthmore School Board discussed the possibility — and what a reopening could look like — at a three-plus-hour meeting on Monday night. Also: concerns about screen time, sports, and more.
As houses in the borough keep getting bigger, they fetch higher sale prices when they turn over. This means that the people who can afford to move to this town have to be increasingly rich. But while the property belongs to one person or family, the town belongs to all of us. This is about me. It’s about who I want my neighbors to be. This is about us, and what kind of community we want to be.
Issues around eating and body image are complicated. But the evidence is clear. Charlotte Markey, a psychology professor at Rutgers University-Camden who lives in Swarthmore says, that people with a poor body image are particularly vulnerable to anxiety, depression, and eating disorders — including anorexia, bulimia, and binge-eating disorder. Markey had recently received advance copies of her book “The Body Image Book for Girls: Love Yourself and Grow Up Fearless” when she visited my porch one afternoon last month for a conversation with another visitor, Emma Borgstrom, a 21-year-old Temple University student and Strath Haven High School graduate, who struggled with an eating disorder for years.
I could write a whole editorial about the decline of newspapers as a kind of found poem: a series of dire headlines. Even before the pandemic — even before accelerated attacks on the press by the occupant of the White House and police targeting of journalists during protests across the country — things were looking grim for newspapers.
The new principal of Strath Haven High School has been a teacher, a basketball coach, and an assistant principal, as well as a school counselor. But the counseling feels central to his 20-plus years as an educator. “As a leader, you need to understand people,” Hilden says. “People need to be heard.”
As Swarthmore College readies itself to begin its fall semester on Monday, President Val Smith has announced that the campus is now closed to visitors. In an open letter to community residents, Smith explained that the college is inviting approximately 700 students — mostly first-years and sophomores — back to campus for a shortened fall semester. “Although outdoor spaces are generally considered safe,” Smith wrote, “with nearly 700 students, as well as a significant number of faculty and staff, on campus, maintaining social distancing will be much harder than it has been over the past five months.”
The Swarthmore Planning Commission unanimously voted to disapprove the sale of the Delaware County Regional Water Authority (DELCORA) to Aqua Pennsylvania at their meeting on August 26. DELCORA, a public wastewater management utility, has proposed to sell its assets and responsibilities to the private, publicly traded corporation. Aqua PA has offered $276 million in a no-bid deal. Commission members voiced a range of concerns about the sale.
Swarthmore’s Planning Commission approved plans to subdivide the property at 686 N. Chester Road into two parcels at a nearly three-hour meeting on August 19. The vote was 10 to 1, with commissioner James Levine voting no.
The first Sal’s Barber Shop opened in Plymouth Meeting ten years ago. Pretty soon, owner Sal Giannone opened two more. He has repeatedly won Best Barbershop and Best Children’s Haircut in Montgomery County, as well as Entrepreneur of the Year. With clients coming from as far away as Delaware for cuts, he decided to open a fourth shop in Delco at 415 Dartmouth Ave.
All-virtual school until October. That recommendation from Wallingford-Swarthmore School Superintendent Lisa Palmer was accepted by the school board at a special meeting on Monday night. The vote was 7-1, with Chapin Cimino abstaining. Board member Jennifer Lentz voted against the proposal. Three weeks earlier, on July 20, the board voted to give families the option of attending school two days a week (“the cohort model”) or having all virtual instruction (“the online academy”). 73% of high school students and 67% of middle and elementary school students had opted to return to school buildings when the school year begins on August 31. But COVID-19 numbers have increased in Delaware County since July.
Swarthmore architect Samina Iqbal attended the Swarthmore Human Relations Commission (HRC) meeting on August 6 to raise the commission’s awareness of accessibility issues in the borough. Iqbal described the slow history of increasing accessibility in the United States, and the disabled community’s frustrations with how little progress has been made in the 30 years since the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act. She described her family’s challenges navigating the public world with her husband, Tony Denninger, in a wheelchair.
As we slog through this dark time, there are also moments of light: the cardinal in the tree, the child’s chalk drawing on the sidewalk, the sight of my neighbor — hospitalized for over a month with COVID-19 — walking swiftly around the block. The rare face-to-face talk with a friend, with six feet of grass between us.
