Strong schools + business involvement = success

On a mild September afternoon, crowds have gathered on a sunlit blacktop to cheer on their favorite teams of 20 people from area businesses – some attired in superhero garb – engaged in a game of tug-of-war.

At the other end of the rope hulks an 80,000-lb. semi truck emblazoned with the Towne Air Freight logo on its side.

Jerry Scott, Towne Air Freight’s senior vice president for human resources & corporate administration

Towne Air Freight is one of numerous businesses currently engaged in partnerships created to support South Bend public schools. For a company that launched the enormously successful Read To A Child program – which then became a model for the entire corporation’s Partner Up initiative – the Our Towne Truck Pull* is a logical next step toward the goal of a well-educated, successful community.

Besides vying to see which team can drag the truck the required 12 feet the fastest, participants are driven by a far greater challenge: to raise funds for reading centers targeted for at-risk kids at primary centers (grades K-4) in the South Bend Community School Corp.

“We believe that the success of the SBCSC is hugely important to the future of our entire community and has a direct impact on our ability to be successful as a business,” says Jerry Scott, the company’s senior vice president for human resources & corporate administration.

‘It’s all about the community’

That sentiment is echoed by Rick Rice. He’s the president of Teachers Credit Union, whose numerous multifaceted engagements with the public school system should come as no surprise, considering the fact that the credit union’s founders were themselves public schoolteachers.

“We’re very supportive of public education,” says Rice, as he reels off a list of initiatives in which TCU is engaged, including:

1. Sponsoring 50 new-teacher orientation days and annual recognition days every year for the past 38 years.

2. Providing $10,000 annually to support extracurricular and athletic programs. “It’s not always the prominent sports such as football,” Rice says. “We also sponsor minor sports, such as golf teams. We don’t dictate to schools what they should do with the money.”

3. Sponsoring a superintendent’s golf outing to raise money for scholarships.

4. Supporting individual employees who volunteer in mentoring programs, reading programs, and career day activities.

“We do everything, because you measure the success of the community by the success of your public schools,” says Rice. “It’s our school system. It’s all about the community. We have schools in our community not because we want to feel good about helping them, but because we want to fill the community with productive citizens.”

*To find out more about the Our Towne Truck Pull, go to www.firstgiving.com/edfo.