Kevin Riordan: Camden kids share a blessing

A forest of little hands rises high and a chorus of little voices rises higher as author Judith Nadell describes how a boy named Victor gets ready for school.

She's reading Victor Packs to a lively bunch of kindergartners at St. Joseph's Pro-Cathedral School in Camden. It's a charming little tale, but the bigger story here is about a husband-and-wife team of educational-book publishers and their $1 million donation to Camden's children.

"It's a blessing for us to be able to do this," says Nadell's husband, John Langan, president of Townsend Press in Berlin Township. "It's that simple."

The Voorhees couple - low-key and long-standing benefactors of urban education nationwide - last week shared the story of their recent donation to the new Catholic Partnership Schools.

This nonprofit organization, independent from the Diocese of Camden, will use the money to help Catholic education survive and thrive when urban parochial schools across the country are closing.

The partnership is fund-raising for Holy Name, St. Anthony's, Sacred Heart, and St. Joseph's, the four remaining Catholic elementary schools in the city. It also supports St. Cecelia's, which is in Pennsauken but attracts a large number of Camden youngsters.

K-8 enrollment at the schools totals 1,000.

"It's not right that children in Camden have so many challenges because of the misguided adults in their lives, whether those adults are wounded parents or self-serving politicians or burned-out teachers," Langan says.

He and his wife of 36 years are former educators, and while Langan grew up in Reading and Nadell hails from Boston (and has the accent to prove it), both have come to care deeply for Camden.

This is a sentiment familiar to anyone, including a newspaper columnist, lucky enough to meet the real people behind the headlines in the city. The place just gets into your heart somehow.

"I want to be here. Emotionally, I need to be here," says Nadell, a longtime literacy volunteer who taught communications at Rowan University in the 1990s, leaving to write children's books.

Victor Packs is one of the 70 books in her King School series, in which characters are based on students she tutored at Washington School in the city's Cramer Hill section. The books sell for $1 each.

At St. Joe's, a substantial Westfield Avenue edifice that's been an East Camden anchor since 1929, Langan and Nadell are hands-on. They provide books to students so they can build their own libraries at home; Nadell visits to read to students once a month.

"It opens a window for them so they can see past their own lives," says principal Fran Montgomery, who oversees 264 students in kindergarten through eighth grade.

Montgomery has been at St. Joseph's for 21 years, the last six as principal. The school "is truly blessed by the number of people who reach out to us," she says.

But the needs are bottomless. Sister Karen Dietrich, the partnership's executive director, says the Langan-Nadell donation will help with "practical issues," such as transporting children to tutors and other enrichment programs. "We also want to make sure children are academically prepared" for high school and college, Dietrich adds. Geographically, the five schools form something of a circle and are in range of virtually every neighborhood. And the total enrollment "means we can have a major impact" on Camden's next generation, Dietrich says.

For kids whose families lack the wherewithal for quality reading material, a chance to have books of their own can be a real motivator, as anyone who grew as an avid reader knows.

Access to books is a real issue in Camden, which recently closed one library and plans to shutter another. Langan and Nadell also are giving $100,000 to help Camden County maintain library services in the city.

And they're making sure that all of the kindergartners, first graders, and other grade levels at all five partnership schools are getting at least 10 books to keep during the school year.

"I saw two testosterone-fueled little boys actually kiss the books," Nadell says.

"In Judaism, when a child first studies the Torah, traditionally they are given a spoonful of honey, to associate learning with sweetness," she adds. "We're trying to create that sweetness."