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Razzle dazzle ’em Township honors ‘leading force’ Campbell thanked for decades of community service By Michele Alperin At a recent Bordentown Township Committee meeting, Mayor Steve Benowitz honored Helen Elizabeth “Bettye” Roberts Campbell with “the longest proclamation I ever did” for her many contributions to the Bordentown community, including her involvement in planning the town’s Black History Month celebrations. “Bettye was a leading force, instrumental in helping us to get this event started and she has stayed with it all six years,” Benowitz says. “Without Bettye Campbell the events would have taken place but would not have been the same thing.” In 2014, Benowitz realized
that Bordentown Township had never officially observed Black History Month, and he reached out to Campbell, who had been a faculty child and later a faculty wife on the campus of the Bordentown Manual Training School, a coeducational academic and vocational boarding school, operated by the State of New Jersey, that served African American children, seventh grade and up. Benowitz had learned about this “black-only school, the Tuskegee of the North” through a Bordentown Historical Society presentation. Campbell and Benowitz worked together on a Black History Month program that focused on local history via the Manual Training School, which was founded by former slave Rev. Walter A. Rice in 1886 and moved to 400 acres in Bordentown in 1896. It closed in 1955, not long after the
1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision made segregated schools illegal. The first two years they held the program at the Bordentown Township Senior Center, focusing on BMTS graduates Nathaniel Hampton and John Medley. Medley, who graduated in BMTS’s last class in 1954 and is also the school historian, shared his memorabilia. They also screened the PBS film, “A Place Out of Time: The Bordentown School.” After two years, Campbell says, “we realized that the children were in school during the day and we weren’t reaching the students.” Because, Benowitz says, “we want this event to continue forever and the best way to do it is to reach out to the younger generation,” they reached out to Robert Walder, principal of See CAMPBELL, Page 10
Jazz band takes second at festival Bordentown students win awards at prestigious competition By KeVin KUnZMAnn
Annissa Richards performs in Bordentown Regional High School’s production of “Chicago,” which ran March 1 and 2 at the school’s performing arts center. For more photos, turn to Page 8. (Photo by Suzette J. Lucas.)
Something told Michael Montalto to hold off on applying for the Berklee High School Jazz Festival for just one more year. The Bordentown Regional School District director of bands was in his seventh year overseeing the program, and over that time he saw the constant improvement of his students. Children who started off just learning how to grip their instruments in his fourth grade classes were now playing fluently as high school upperclassmen. Their skills war-
ranted more opportunities, and the 50th annual Berklee High School Jazz Festival last year in Boston fit the bill. Still, Montalto held off on plans to compete until this year—and the hunch paid off. Last month, he and his 22-student jazz ensemble finished second in its pool of 16 bands. The festival, a collection of 150plus high school bands from 15 different states at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, exposed the students to new levels of competition, and vindicated years of practice. “It’s a pretty prestigious festival, and there were a lot of great bands across the country, so we were honored just to have gotten to place,” Montalto said. The festival is a one-day competition involving big bands, combos and vocal jazz ensembles per-
forming for a panel of Berklee’s faculty members. Each ensemble is given a written critique from the panel, who also select the finalists from six categories separated by school size. For the 18-minute, three-song performance, the Bordentown team was awarded second place, and received three awards for individual performances: junior trumpeter Samantha MacFarlane and sophomore alto saxophonist Nikolas Romano received “Outstanding Musicianship” awards, and sophomore vibraphonist Nick Demkowicz received the ensemble’s “Judges Choice” award. As part of the awards, the trio were award partial scholarships to the college’s summer programs. MacFarlane, who had never participated in a competitive See JAZZ, Page 7
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