President’s Message – May 2024

How Far Have We Come in Recent Years?

In 2018, the decision was made by the EHSA Board of Directors to set up a separate EHSA office, outside of the English High School building.  It would be an office arrangement, run as a small business entity, to better connect with and serve our 17,000 English High alumni. Since then, this new office’has taken on a life of its own —  producing English High’s historic 200^th Anniversary Gala in October, 2022 and establishing an ongoing fundraising operation in order to provide increased academic resources for our students. Mission accomplished on many fronts.

But today, like last month and in advance of the upcoming 200^th Graduation Ceremony on June 7th, we need your loyal support to continue to do our job. Asking for funds is a tall order by any definition. Raising funds is tedious, takes pluck and is the lifeblood of nonprofits. And the English High School Association is no exception. We need your help.

Our overall giving scorecard is ok. Out of the 10,000 alumni we regularly communicate with, some 3% of you actively support our Association.  Given where we were six years ago, that is a huge accomplishment and I thank those who have made gifts and those of you who have been consistent supporters.  But we’d love to see more alumni take a step forward to help us support today’s English High students.

Supporting the English High School Association is supporting English High students of today and helping them become tomorrow’s leaders. Towards that end, many alumni scholarships have been instrumental in students’ matriculation. We have cited many student success stories of graduates going to schools like Wellesley College, Norwich University, Simmons University, Babson College, BU, the list goes and on and on. Since 2018, we’ve awarded over $78,000 in actual assistance dollars to English High School graduates.

During that time, we’ve established seven new scholarships and we invite you to consider sponsoring a scholarship.  It’s an easy gift to set up. Many love the idea of a simple way to leave an individual or family legacy at our Alma Mater. Call our office, we can walk you through it. Just last week, two new alumni did just that, establishing a scholarship in memory of a family member who had passed.  Those two were awarded at Senior Awards night, May 28^th.   Read here the list of Memorial Scholarships that have been established through EHSA and will be awarded to members of the Class of 2024.

Back in 2018 we started with 473 alumni email addresses on our list. Today we have more than 8,500! We’ve emailed over 150,000 monthly newsletters to keep you updated on our students, English High staff and many alumni stories that are fun to read about.  In 2018 we also had only 2,500 home addresses. Today we boast over 10,000 confirmed alumni names and addresses!  This is real progress and as some of you have noted, we cannot go back to the days of little communication and no fundraising. Please check with us to confirm we have your best phone number and email address to round out your alumni profile.  To confirm your contact information:

Contact the EHSA office by phone at 857-547-1391  OR  Confirm your contact information through our website

My hope is if you’ve read this far, you know how you can help us. Our job is to not only keep the trains running by giving you a communication line but also a voice in who we are and what we do. With your help, we will continue do the good work an alumni group does.

To those who have given, my heartfelt thanks, again! The other 97% I expect you’ve heard our ask and I hope you step up this month.

CLICK HERE TO MAKE YOUR GIFT TODAY

Remember we have a Matching Gift in place for up to $60,000 so gifts made are doubled.

Three cheers for our English High Baseball Team which won the City Championship again. We’re onto the State Tournament!!

Cheers,