Marist Connections

The statistics are bleak: Almost 50% of new teachers leave the profession within their first five years in the classroom. Through eight in-depth case studies, Why Half of Teachers Leave the Classroom: Understanding Recruitment and Retention in Today’s Schools clarifies the factors influencing teachers career paths, depicts the toll that teacher attrition takes on the teachers themselves, and argues for p...

Jim DeFelice co-authored Whatever it Took: An American Paratrooper’s Extraordinary Memoir of Escape, Survival, and Heroism in the Last Days of WWII with Henry Langrehr who survived D-Day and World War II. Now 97, Henry remembers parachuting into France, surviving heavy anti-aircraft fire, being captured by Nazis, living in a death camp for two weeks before rescue, and returning home. Jim help...

Faith + Purpose = Legacy: 7 Steps to Strengthen Communities Through Entrepreneurship encourages parents, particularly fathers to strive to be the best they can be at leading their family or business venture, while showing strength, integrity and leadership skills, in order to strengthen our communities. The wealth gap, particularly the racial wealth gap, is growing and has important, negative implications for working people and fam...

The Fermented Man: A Year on the Front Lines of a Food Revolution follows Derek as he spends a year living off nothing but fermented foods while chronicling their history, cultural significance, and evolution. He goes beyond yogurt and sauerkraut to show us how fermentation occurs in a wide range of foods we might never have expected. From foraging for living bacteria in the modern American gr...

Chronicling businesses who sue clients for leaving negative reviews, activists using Yelp as a form of protest, students relying on Rate My Professor to select classes, and companies who have paid to have negative reviews scrubbed from the internet, Alison Novak '07 illustrates the complicated yet important role of third-party review sites and the impact they have on the global economy. The Ne...

A Sound History: Lawrence Gellert, Black Musical Protest, and White Denial traces the rise and fall of Lawrence Gellert, a little-known left-wing independent music collector as it explores changing perceptions of African American musical resistance in the twentieth century. At a time of institutionalized suppression, he worked to introduce white audiences to a tradition of black musical protest that had been denied and overlooked b...

Pari Forood MPA'19 is the author of the true-life novel, The Gates of Light. While working as Press Secretary for Congressman Hamilton Fish, Jr., Pari discovers her seventeen-year-old Iranian cousin has been drafted during the Iran/Iraq war. He must flee from Iran or face an almost certain death.Joining a cast of international characters that include Pakistani black-market passport dealers, members of Francois Mitterrand's inner po...

Dana Jones '20 is the founder of Accessadoor, an organization dedicated to making handicap accessible doors accessible by all. The kit enables establishments to turn ordinary handicap accessible doors into a system that can be operated by a smartphone app. She chats with Amy Woods '97 about her experiences in becoming an entrepreneur and founder before graduating college - funding, creating a team, dealing with rejection, and the b...

In 2016, Kyle Mikesh '16 and Cameron Schuh '15 set out on a 61-day 3,400 mile bike ride from Plymouth, Massachusetts to Ventura, California to raise money for ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. They dedicated their journey to the memory of Michael Hamill, a longtime friend of both, who passed away after a long battle with the illness. Their trip raised $3,000 towards ALS research.

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In 2011, Brooke hosted the first ever P.S. I Love You Day for suicide prevention and mental health awareness at her high school. The day takes place in honor of Brooke’s father, Joseph, who committed suicide when she was 14 years old, and the effort began as a way to promote kindness in small but meaningful ways. Her event, which takes place on the second Friday in February has since been picked up by more th...

April Wennerstrom '93 is the Director of Keep America Beautiful, a nonprofit striving to End Littering, Improve Recycling, and Beautify America’s Communities. It is the nation’s leading community improvement nonprofit organization.

Helen Stahlin Corvelyn '00 is currently the STEM Coordinator at Hopewell Elementary School in New Jersey and Director of Gardens and Vertical Farming K-5. Helen has also participated in two Earth Expedi...