Harmony education center kicks off campaign drive

A local independent school kicked off a national campaign drive Tuesday geared toward raising over $6 million. Over half of that money will be devoted to the restoration and maintenance of Harmony School's historic Elm Heights facilities, while $2.5 million will be devoted to scholarship interests. \nCrews will break ground at Elm Heights June 1 and expect work to be completed in September 2005, said Thomas Zoss, director of institutional advancement for the Harmony Education Center. Founded in 1974, the Harmony School found its first homes in local churches and began renting space in the Elm Heights building, previously used as a public school, in 1983. In 1985, it acquired the property outright and completed an initial renovation in 1986. \nThe first stage of construction will focus on exterior renovations, including sewer and drainage reconstruction and making the facility handicap accessible. The second stage, slated for summer 2005, will involve interior renovations, decoration and wiring, said Barb Bonchek, building director. \nThe campaign's scholarship initiative, driven by $2.5 million in matching funds from the Josephine Bay Paul and C. Michael Paul Foundation, will facilitate further expansion of Harmony's commitment to collaborative learning among teachers, parents and students alike. Harmony will raise the first $5 million and additional local donors have pledged close to $1 million in other matching funds.\n"We are so pleased and proud of the initial commitment we have received from national and local friends of Harmony," HEC executive director Steve Bonchek said. "These matching funds will help other donors leverage their support to help meet our funding goals."\nDeemed essential to finance Harmony's "leap into the future" by Bonchek, the campaign includes several segments intended to address the needs of both the school and the HEC's various arms throughout the community, including Rhino's All Ages Music Club and the National School Reform Faculty. The latter, housed in Bloomington since 2000, directs the work of 27 centers nationwide dedicated to guiding school reform efforts in the United States. HEC also encompasses the work of the Institute for Research, which conducts inquiries into service learning and the experiences of people working and studying at Harmony, as well as the ways in which Harmony catalyzes change in public schools.\nJesse Goodman, who founded the HEC with Steve Bonchek and Daniel Baron, works primarily with the Institute of Research to support scholarship on the activities of Harmony School, as well as the broad domain of democratically-minded and progressive education. He says while the Institute will not receive any of the campaign drives funding per se, he feels the initiative will do much to further the school's mission of providing community-minded education. \n"Harmony differs primarily as concerns the intellectual and social context within which education takes place at the school," said Goodman, a professor in the School of Education for over 20 years. "In particular, while most conventional schools are influenced a great deal by politicians and what business leaders say, Harmony is really much more rooted in intellectual tradition and wanting students to come to understand themselves and their own talents, and how to build on those talents to be a viable member of the community."\nThe school has completed several such funding drives over its decades-long history. An endowment for the school was established at the Brown County Community Foundation in 1993, followed by a $100,000 campaign in 1999. Those funds were matched by a $225,000 Lilly Endowment and were followed by a $2.5 million grant in 2003 from the Paul Foundation of New York City. \nThe campaign will be led by Carl Cook, vice president of Bloomington's Cook Group; Frederick Bay, director of the Josephine Bay Paul and C. Michael Paul Foundation; and honorary chair and IU president emeritus John W. Ryan.\n-- Contact city & state editor Holly Johnson at hljohnso@indiana.edu .