Tom Munds

Hurry. Hurry. Step right up and buy your tickets for the Englewood Education Foundation’s annual Fall Fling.

The ticket offers an opportunity to have a good time while helping to provide scholarships to Englewood graduates and grants supporting school projects.

This year’s Fall Fling will feature a gourmet dinner, live music by professional performer and Englewood High School graduate Brian Leonard, a silent auction and a live auction plus, for many attendees, an opportunity to renew old acquaintances.

The event will be at 6 p.m. Nov. 15 in the community room on the second floor of the Englewood Civic Center, 1000 Englewood Parkway.

A variety of items have been donated for the auctions, including Southwest Airline tickets, a baseball bat signed by Matt Holliday of the Colorado Rockies and framed original art work.

Again this year, items expected to receive a lot of silent auction attention are the art chairs. Each child-sized chair is an original, created by the artist for the auction. Those creating chairs include artists, teachers and community business leaders.

Tickets are $50 per person. For information on the event or to buy tickets, call 303-761-4021.

“Fall Fling is our major annual event to raise funds for our projects,” said Mary Dounay, foundation president. “The proceeds from last year’s Fall Fling went a long way toward helping us award about $7,500 in scholarships to 2007 graduates of Englewood High School and Colorado’s Finest Alternative High School and this year, we were able to award $11,500 in scholarships.”

The foundation also provides money, called creativity grants, to help teachers in Englewood schools fund educational programs that otherwise wouldn’t happen because those programs wouldn’t receive funding through the district budget.

“In 2006, the EEF provided almost $11,000 in creativity grants and, thanks to generous donors, we awarded almost $20,000 in grants this year,” Dounay said.

The Fall Fling was a one-time event a few years ago but returned in today’s form as the major foundation fundraiser in 2002.

The event took place in several locations including the Cable Center at the University of Denver. But the desire was to bring it home, and that desire is a reality with the event now taking place in the Englewood Civic Center.

“We got a lot of help bringing the Fall Fling back to Englewood,” Dounay said. “For example, the city council waived the fees for the use of the community room and sponsors are covering all the other costs of the event. That means that virtually all the proceeds from the event will be used for scholarships and creativity grants.”

The foundation was established in 1989 to provide a way for donors to give gifts of materials and money to the school district. The organization was granted nonprofit status by the Internal Revenue Service so the donations are tax-deductible.

The initial foundation project was awarding creativity grants which provide full or partial funding for projects that aren’t budget items. A few years later, the funds were available to begin providing scholarships to help high school graduates continue their education.

Dounay recently made the check presentation for the creativity grant to Strings Attached, the elementary school program offering after-school violin and cello lessons.

Strings Attached was established as a pilot program at the beginning of the 2002-03 school year and marked the first time in about two decades Englewood Elementary School students have had the opportunity to take beginning music lessons through the schools.

Strings Attached provides each student a lesson once a week as part of the KidQuest after-school program. In the first year of the pilot program, the classes are taught at Clayton and Maddox elementary schools and the program is open to third- and fifth-graders.

The program attracted students and now the after-school lessons are offered at all five Englewood elementary schools.

It was expanded from just providing violin lessons to offering lessons for young musicians who wanted to learn to play the cello. About 100 students are enrolled in the program.

The grant was awarded in memory of the late Englewood Mayor Olga Wolosyn. In addition to serving as mayor, Wolosyn was a tireless supporter of the arts and a foundation volunteer.

Money will go to scholarships, grants for school projects