Video Description:

In the blue background on the left side of the brief animation of motion of PSD logo of yellow hands open with white roof and columns, yellow roof and door come out. On the right side, Yellow lettering of “PB’s Corner May 2022”

Dark blue background with gold frame, in the background there is 10% opacity of Philadelphia city outline. Top left: PSD 200 logo. Top right: 200th Anniversary Gala. Peter Bailey appear. He is wearing a blue dress shirt with pattern color tie. He is standing.

Hello everyone. This is my monthly vlog for May 2022. We are approaching the end of the school year and my goal is to keep these monthly vlogs going. The information I have to share this month is about what happened in the month of April. There has been a lot going on at the school so I will try to capture all of it here. There are always events coming up so I will have more to share in the coming months.

First of all, PSD finally celebrated our 202nd birthday. We did celebrate the bicentennial but we had to delay that because of COVID. I am looking forward to having COVID in the rear view mirror. I have been getting some questions so I wanted to offer some clarification. April 20, 1820 has, for a long time, been thought to be PSD’s birthday. After some research, looking into the history and asking people who know the school’s history we have discovered that April 20th does not have any significance to the school. I don’t know why april 20th was chosen to be the day to honor PSD’s founding for so many years. Regardless, April 12th is actually the day that we want to celebrate and recognize PSD’s birthday. We are no longer recognizing April 20th as it does not seem to have any connection to our actual history. The three dates of significance are: April 12, which was the day the founders first met and talked about establishing the school. April 15, which was the day that the board agreed to the starting of the school. April 26th, which was the day that the board started selecting people to get involved. So april 12th is really the first date that people started meeting and that is the date that we are going to be recognizing our birthday going forward. It will be April 12th not April 20th that we want you to think about when celebrating PSD. I  still don’t know why April 20th ever came to be our birthday but after asking people and looking into the history we have no more information about that. April 12, 1820 is the date to recognize and no more April 20th.

In connection with that I wanted to make sure to clarify some of the other celebrations We have been doing this year. There was some confusion about the time capsule and I want to make sure we understand there are actually two time capsules. One is the school’s and one is the alumni’s. They have their own time capsule. There seems to be some confusion that others wanted to be involved in the opening of the school’s time capsule. The school’s time capsule is for our event, for current students, for those who are here at the school currently. The alumni do have a time capsule as well. I know that the students who were involved in building and putting things into the time capsule in 1984 have now turned into alumni who want to be involved in the opening of that time capsule. So this is a reminder that the time capsule made by those students was made for the students at the time when it was opened, these are our current students now. We will make sure that you can see what was inside and see the opening of it through a video and pictures. I have to commend the students who built that time capsule in 1984. They made a very solid set of drawers. It is a very solid piece of furniture and everything needed to be unscrewed individually to open it. When we did that we discovered all of the contents inside were in good condition. You can not actually see the contents without taking off the wood cover for each of the drawers. We have decided to replace those wood pieces with plexiglass so when you open the drawers you can see what is inside. We are working on that now. May 21st will be Alumni Day and we will not have the information ready yet for everyone to see it on that day. We are being very protective of the contents and we don’t want things coming out of the drawers and then not going back in correctly. We are going to leave everything as is until we can install those plexiglass plates. If you have questions about the alumni time capsule then Denise Brown is the person to ask about that. Any questions or concerns from alumni should be fielded to her not directly to me. Denise and I are in touch. Going forward we will have more information shared about that and I look forward to seeing you all at the PSD Alumni Day. It will be held here on campus so we welcome alumni to come back to the campus to see each other for the first time in three years. Due to COVID we have not had Alumni Day held on campus so we are really looking forward to it being here again. I also wanted to talk about what else is going on at the school specifically. We have had a number of successful events recently as we are starting to reopen the campus. One I would like to mention is the book fair. We were not able to do the book fair in person for the last few years because of COVID but we had a tremendous success this year opening it up again. We will have more information to share with you in May because we are approaching the end of the school year so there are other events coming up.

Last, but not least, for this month you may have seen information go out about our Annual Report. We sent it out already by putting it on our website and sending in an email blast. We will be doing a paper version sent out in the mail as well. The Annual Report is very important and it comes out a year after the end of that fiscal year. The one that just went out was for fiscal year 2021 (not fiscal year 2022, our current school year). If you are looking for your name regarding whether you made a contribution, keep in mind that you should be thinking about the previous year – fiscal year 2021. Other information in that annual report reflects that year as well as is not about our current school year. We hope that this information is helpful to all of you. Other than that things are going well. The school continues to reopen and we are making lots of good plans and looking forward to graduation. It will be such a special celebration. Keep an eye out for more information including pictures and video of the opening of that time capsule. Thank you all. So long.

End with a blue background. Top PSD logo of yellow hands open with white roof and columns, yellow roof and door. White Lettering “Pennsylvania School for the Deaf”

Four social media outlet logos on the bottom of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Youtube logos. Yellow lettering “@psd1820”