Last night at the PNC club, housed in Papa John’s Stadium, the Meredith-Dunn school hosted its first ever Take Heart fundraiser gala. The sold out event, capped at 250 people, featured a silent and live auction, as well as an impressive spread of food and drink.
The Meredith-Dunn school is designed for students with learning differences, and admits students from first to eighth grades. I her speech to gala attendees, Principal Kathy Beam told of students coming from as far away as Bardstown to attend; those students are often thought of as “forgotten, they are called lazy and unmotivated.” The goal of Meredith-Dunn is to find out how those students tick and enable them to succeed in their educations.
The school hosts other fund raising events throughout the year, including a fall fair and a golf scramble, but board member Shawn Freibart believes that the gala will be the biggest fundraiser this year “the golf scramble is usually our biggest fundraiser,” he said, “but I see a lot of faces here I’ve never seen before. This is going to be a big night.” One of the many fundraising activities was a solicitation for donations - they took them in a live bid style round of amounts from $5,000 all the way to $100, netting over $14,000 in donations.
One of the most exciting events of the evening was a “heads and tails” - akin to a fifty-fifty raffle, but entry into the contest simply allowed you to guess coin flips, ending in one winner after elimination for wrong guesses. Like a fifty-fifty, the winner took home half the earnings, amounting to nearly a thousand dollars.
The evening was capped off by a multi-course meal with optional vegetarian dishes and a rich chocolate cake, accompanied by a live auction that netted even more money for the school. The gala was a rousing success for Meredith-Dunn, netting a small fortune in donations to enable them to continue to serve students who are often ignored and fall to the wayside. Hopefully this will be the first of many successful galas for them, ensuring that differences in learning styles aren't ignored.
