Kevin Riordan: Camden kids share a blessing

A forest of little hands rises high and a chorus of little voices rises higher as author Judith Nadell describes how a boy named Victor gets ready for school.

She's reading Victor Packs to a lively bunch of kindergartners at St. Joseph's Pro-Cathedral School in Camden. It's a charming little tale, but the bigger story here is about a husband-and-wife team of educational-book publishers and their $1 million donation to Camden's children.

"It's a blessing for us to be able to do this," says Nadell's husband, John Langan, president of Townsend Press in Berlin Township. "It's that simple."

The Voorhees couple - low-key and long-standing benefactors of urban education nationwide - last week shared the story of their recent donation to the new Catholic Partnership Schools.

This nonprofit organization, independent from the Diocese of Camden, will use the money to help Catholic education survive and thrive when urban parochial schools across the country are closing.

The partnership is fund-raising for Holy Name, St. Anthony's, Sacred Heart, and St. Joseph's, the four remaining Catholic elementary schools in the city. It also supports St. Cecelia's, which is in Pennsauken but attracts a large number of Camden youngsters.

K-8 enrollment at the schools totals 1,000.

"It's not right that children in Camden have so many challenges because of the misguided adults in their lives, whether those adults are wounded parents or self-serving politicians or burned-out teachers," Langan says.

He and his wife of 36 years are former educators, and while Langan grew up in Reading and Nadell hails from Boston (and has the accent to prove it), both have come to care deeply for Camden.

This is a sentiment familiar to anyone, including a newspaper columnist, lucky enough to meet the real people behind the headlines in the city. The place just gets into your heart somehow.

"I want to be here. Emotionally, I need to be here," says Nadell, a longtime literacy volunteer who taught communications at Rowan University in the 1990s, leaving to write children's books.

Victor Packs is one of the 70 books in her King School series, in which characters are based on students she tutored at Washington School in the city's Cramer Hill section. The books sell for $1 each.