STOUGHTON STUDENT WINS MWRA AWARD: Stoughton resident Elizabeth Hanson, a seventh grader at St. John the Evangelist School in Canton, won Honorable Mention in MWRAʼs annual writing contest, according to a press release from the MWRA.

A ceremony honoring the winning students and their teachers was held at Deer Island on May 25. Bill Galvin, Jr. attended the event to present a Special Citation to Hanson on behalf of Rep. Louis Kafka.

This year, students from schools across MWRAʼs service area were challenged to write about the benefits of water conservation or to create posters about what happens at the Deer Island Wastewater Treatment Plant. 

MWRA received more than 1,100 writing entries and 1,750 posters. The annual poster and writing contest is part of MWRAʼs School Education Program, which educates students and teachers about the public health significance of water supply and wastewater treatment. 

Hanson's winning essay is posted on MWRAʼs web site: 

http://www.mwra.com/annual/contest/2012/writing/11-68-hm1-hanson.html

To view all the winning posters and essays, visit www.mwra.com.

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STOUGHTON CULTURAL COUNCIL COMMUNITY INPUT MEETING:  The Stoughton Cultural Council will be holding a Community Input Meeting on Monday, June 18 at 7 p.m. in the Stoughton Public Library's Wales French Room (on the upper level.)

Through community input, the Council hopes to collect diverse viewpoints about the community's resources, interests, and needs. By getting your feedback, you can help guide the grant-making decisions, as there are always more requests than can be funded.

Visit www.stoughton-ma.gov and go to Cultural Council page to download guidelines. If you can't attend, but would like to comment, send email to cultural@stoughton-ma.gov. Light refreshments will be served. You can also visit www.massculturalcouncil.org for information on the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

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TEMPLE SPEAKER SERIES CONTINUES: Ahavath Torah Congregation continues its acclaimed Hausman Memorial Free Speech Lecture Series on Wednesday, June 20 at 7:30 p.m. with Professor Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, on "Combating anti-Semitism on University Campuses and Beyond." Suggested donation is $10 per person. Professor Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, a lecturer at the University of California Santa Cruz, is changing the conditions throughout the UC system almost single-handedly with her force of intellect and courage. She has written articles about academic anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism and lectured widely on these developments and on the growing threat to the safety of Jewish students on college campuses. 

In July 2010, she co-organized a 2-week scholarly workshop entitled “Contemporary Anti-Semitism in Higher Education” at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies in Washington D.C., and with Kenneth Marcus, the workshop’s other co-organizer, she is editing a book of scholarly articles on campus-based anti-Semitism. Along with Dr. Leila Beckwith, she is the co-founder of the AMCHA Initiative, a grass-roots advocacy coalition dedicated to protecting Jewish students on university campuses within California. 

She and Dr. Beckwith also recently co-founded the Investigative Taskforce on Campus Antisemitism, an organization whose mission is to investigate and report incidents of anti-Semitism that occur in institutions of higher education in the United States, to document their effect on students, faculty, and staff, and to offer recommendations for addressing the problem on each campus investigated. 

In 2009, she filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, alleging a hostile environment for Jewish students on her campus, and in March 2011 a federal investigation of her complaint was launched and is still pending. 

Ahavath Torah Congregation is located at 1179 Central Street in Stoughton.

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