Photographs by William Taufic.
When Julie Faryniarz’s oldest child started kindergarten at the Riverside School in 1998, she volunteered to be class mom. Now her youngest is about to graduate from high school, but she has no plans to slow down as one of the busiest education advocates in Greenwich.
“I got involved from the day we walked into Riverside School,” says Julie, who hails from Omaha, Nebraska. “The PTA has been such a key part of my life here.” After many years as class mom, Julie became Riverside’s PTA president. Moving up the ranks, she served on the executive board of the Greenwich PTA Council for five years, including two years as president.
Now Julie is heading into her sixth year as executive director of the Greenwich Alliance for Education. Her friend Sue Rogers comments, “Through Julie’s leadership, efforts and determination, the Alliance has successfully improved the lives of hundreds of Greenwich students from preschool through college.”
Julie launched the Alliance’s Tuning In To Music program, which offers free instrumental music lessons to students who can’t afford private lessons and inevitably would fall behind the many pupils in Greenwich who can. “It’s about leveling the playing field,” explains Julie. Several Tuning In To Music participants were selected to play at Carnegie Hall and another is involved in a program at Julliard, but just seeing the kids at the school recital is a high point for Julie. “To watch these kids grow up in the program, and see the way we engage their parents as well, has been really meaningful,” she says.
The Alliance also funds AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination), a college-readiness program for firstgeneration college-bound students. Potential candidates are interviewed in eighth grade and the teachers move along with the students. “They are very invested in the kids. They know their parents. They know their personal stories,” comments Julie, who was instrumental in setting up AVID mentoring and scholarship programs. In the past two years, thirty-nine Greenwich AVID graduates have been the first in their families to go on to college.
Julie also has run the Bridging the Digital Divide program, providing Internet service and computers to seventy-seven Greenwich students. “We brought in the parents and trained them on how to use the computers and email their children’s teachers,” says Julie.
“What we can do later in life is so limited without education,” she continues. “We need exciting ideas to engage kids, to inspire a spark in them. Every child deserves the opportunity to either go to college or develop life skills that will enable them to support a family and live happily.”
Outside of the Alliance, Julie is the volunteer coordinator for the Student Activity office at Greenwich High School, volunteers at the Pacific House homeless shelter, is on the board of the League of Women Voters and the United Way Planning Council.