Home Page: Goals and Purpose

The project's four components were (1) alerting area schools and individual teachers to the educational opportunity the exhibit provided, (2) providing funds for transportation of children to the museum and for payment of museum entrance fees, (3) arranging for Club docents to guide the children around the exhibit and (4) developing a 137 page Polish-American Heritage Instrucitonal Packet that was provided as a reseource to teachers who planned to bring their classes to see the exhibit. Overall ten area schools took advantage of the educational opportunity and over 900 school children visited the exhibit.

In developing the Polish-American Heritage Instrucitonal Packet, the Committee had as its goal the development of a resource database suitable as a multi-cultural guide and activities set for elementary school students on the role of Poles and Polish-Americans in our Society. In assembling the Instructional Packet, the Committee both created and utilized a variety of materials. Noteworthy among these was a printed Curriculum Resource Guide prepared by Chicago's Polish American Heritage Committee for distribution in the Chicago Public Schools and kindly made available to the Club by the Chicago Committee.

The Club's Education Committee, which was chaired by Dr. Teresa Gessner and the members of which were: Cynthia and Ralph Baumgartner, Therese Conlin Clarke, Dr. Peter Gessner, Felix Klempka, Stanley Nowak, Arthur Parks, and Anne Szczesny, envisaged that Instructional Package's materials, appropriately edited and updated, would be transferred to the electronic medium of the Internet and thereby made available to a vastly larger audience. This has since taken place, the materials in question forming the core of the For the Children section of Poland in the Classroom pages of the University at Buffalo Polish Academic Information Center's Info-Poland website.