Nursery School

Barbara Brunermer, cutting brightly colored tissue paper, fields questions from the Pennsbury High School students teaching in the nursery school next door. "Some of the kids don't like the snack. Should we give them something else?" "Do you have any normal-people scissors? I can't use these little ones. " All the while, Brunermer looks through an observation window, monitoring the interaction between the teenagers and the 4-year-olds in the prekindergarten class at the high school.

Ten minutes into the start of nursery school, Brandon Much had an important job to do as classroom Line Leader. With a bright red Line Leader badge pinned to his shirt and a smile on his face, Brandon, 6, led his classmates to the first activity of the day. The simple act of walking is an accomplishment for Brandon, who has cerebral palsy, said Sue McKenney, Strath Haven High School teacher and nursery school director. "He was being carried when he started school. He used a walker at home, but refused in the classroom," McKenney said.

At Marlton's Cherokee High School, some of the best teachers aren't tall enough to reach the faucets of the sinks in the school's home economics rooms. They're not allowed to peek into the refrigerator or turn on the stove or dishwasher, and if they have to go to the bathroom, they have to raise their hands first. After last Friday's burst of cold weather, most of them were wearing winter coats for the first time this year, and nearly all had trouble getting them off. As for being able to tie shoes, forget it. That's why Velcro was invented, their mothers would say. "Here, young children are the teachers," said home economics teacher Teresa Wood, who started a nursery school program at the school as a way for her high school students to get hands-on experience in child development.

Upper Dublin Lutheran Church in Ambler will open a new nursery school this fall, church officials said. The school will offer a "Christ-centered program where each child is nurtured emotionally and educationally," director Amy Conley said. The curriculum will include teachings about God as well as instruction in skills that will prepare children for school, Conley said. Those skills include language and reading, math, communication, listening and sharing. The nursery school will have a morning session and an afternoon session, each with 12 students and each taught by a certified teacher, said Conley, who has taught kindergarten through fourth grade since 1971.

Mary Leonetti Quinto, 80, of West Collingswood, N.J., who was known to generations of South Philadelphia nursery school children and parents as "Miss Mary," died Sunday at Methodist Hospital in Philadelphia. Mrs. Quinto, a former South Philadelphia resident, began working as a substitute child-care worker at the Franklin Day Nursery in 1935. She later became a teacher, then head teacher, and finally teacher/director of the center, which has been in a red-brick rowhouse at Seventh and Jackson Streets since 1909.

A proposal by the Middletown Baptist Church to open a morning-only nursery school has been presented to the Middletown Township Planning Commission. Gary Dunn, attorney representing the church at 28 S. Middletown Rd., said the proposed school would be an accessory use to the church. He told Planning Commission members Tuesday that his presentation was an overview and that official plans would be presented at next month's meeting. "The school will serve between 30 and 50 preschoolers, ages three and four, Monday through Friday, from 9 a.m. to noon," said Dunn.

The Chalfont Borough Council has denied a Plymouth Meeting developer's request for a use-and-occupancy permit for a nursery school in the company's shopping center on Route 202 at Moyer Road. Chris Schubert, an attorney for Pennmark Inc., said it wanted a permit for the Rocking Horse Child Care Center in its New Britain Village Shopping Center "to get the company (Rocking Horse) going. " Borough solicitor L. Franklin Hartzell said at the council meeting Tuesday night that Pennmark would have to redo the paving and make other improvements to allay the borough's concerns about possible liability.

Crossing Cooperative Nursery School will hold its annual book fair from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday through Saturday. The fair will feature hundreds of titles from more than 70 publishers, including how-to books, biographies, classics, and a variety of the newest children's literature. From 10 to 11:30 a.m. Saturday, there also will be a breakfast with Santa. Waffles, fruit, muffins and beverages will be served, and there will be an opportunity to create a holiday craft and have a photo taken with Santa.

Nursery school administrator Daria LeRoy took a chance and broke down a barrier two years ago when she admitted 3-year-old Dominic Montecchio to the Mount Hope Children's Center. Dominic has autism, a condition that affects the ability to socialize and communicate. His mother, Maureen Montecchio, working with LeRoy and Mount Hope teachers, came up with a program that nursery schools can use to include autistic children. The program has caught the attention of the Delaware County Early Childhood Education Association, an organization of nursery school and child-care providers.

Beth Douglas was antsy. She had been called into the McDonald's where she worked, near Underwood-Memorial Hospital in Woodbury, and she was miles away at a body shop she didn't know. Her friend Pat Colna, owner of the nursery school Douglas' children have attended for years, had agreed to give her a lift. But first, Colna said she had some business at the shop. "There was all this commotion and my baby [2-year-old Xavier] was crying a bit in the backseat. I didn't know what to think," Douglas said of the scene last week.

STATE OF GEORGIA. 8:30 p.m. June 29, ABC Family. BEST-SELLING novelist (and longtime Queen Village resident) Jennifer Weiner is going Hollywood. And not the way she did when her second book, "In Her Shoes," was made into a Major Motion Picture and she got to cash the check, drop in on the set and bring her family to the premiere. Or even in the way the former Inquirer feature writer's semiautobiographical Cannie Shapiro did in Weiner's first, breakout novel "Good in Bed," selling a screenplay and becoming BFF with a movie star.

Residents and community organizers took to the streets in Southwest Philadelphia late yesterday afternoon to oppose a proposed prison - or as its supporters call it, a re-entry center - a block from a nursery school. Semantics aside, the planned facility, on Grays Avenue near Lindbergh Boulevard, received a zoning variance in December despite a petition signed by 2,700 people opposing the building. "Why would they put a place here? . . . It's not called for," said Pat Buel, 64, who's lived in the neighborhood for more than 30 years.

After leaving the nursing profession for love, Pauline A. Edmund became her husband's right hand in what would become a world-renowned science-gadget business. She worked as the bookkeeper and personnel manager at the Barrington-based Edmund Scientific Co., founded by her husband, Norman, while also doing volunteer work around South Jersey. No matter what she was involved in, her family said, she always was "the supervisor" or "the boss. " It was ingrained in her personality. Mrs. Edmund, 96, died following a stroke on Thursday, Dec. 23, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where she and her husband had retired in 1975.

Elaine Dumoch, 80, of Mount Laurel, a former community theater actress who also put on educational puppet shows, died from complications of Alzheimer's disease on Sunday, Oct. 10, at her home. In the 1970s, Mrs. Dumoch impressed South Jersey residents with her comic interpretations of various characters, including the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg and George Washington. Mrs. Dumoch acted for a community theater that served Willingboro and Mount Holly for several years, said her daughter Gwen Stubbolo.

Lucille Reilly Parry, 98, a retired kindergarten teacher, died of pneumonia Sunday, May 2, at the Quadrangle retirement community in Haverford. Mrs. Parry and her family moved to Wynnewood from Bergen County, N.J., in 1956 when her husband, Henry T. Parry, an AT&T executive, was transferred. By then, their daughter was a teenager and Mrs. Parry, who had taught physical education in New York as a young woman, returned to the classroom. She taught in a nursery school in Rosemont and then became a kindergarten teacher at Haverford Friends School.

Sister Maria Teresa Pawlaczek, 80, of Cherry Hill, a missionary in Africa for 40 years, died of heart failure Thursday at Virtua Hospital in Voorhees. Sister Teresa was born in Prusy, Poland. In 1940, she and her family, along with more than a million Poles, were deported by the Soviets to work camps in Siberia. The family escaped to the Middle East in 1942. After her father died in Iran, she and her mother and siblings eventually settled in the African territory of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia)

Move over, Shaft. Make room, Superfly. Black Dynamite is comin' to clean up the mess in the 'hood. And mess with your mind while he's at it. A seriously funny send-up of '70s blaxploitation pictures, Michael Jai White and Scott Sanders' Black Dynamite is a multilayered spoof, but also an affectionate homage - and condensed cinema studies course - paying baadasssss tribute to a genre rife with pimps, pushers, foxy ladies, customized...

Carol Jeanne "CJ" Smith, 62, of Elkins Park, a school librarian, died of breast cancer yesterday at home. In 2001, Ms. Smith became librarian at Truman High School in Levittown. That year she was diagnosed with breast cancer. After recovering from surgery, she returned to Truman. "She had a passion for books, for teaching and for young people," said her husband, Andrew Cassel, a former Inquirer staff writer. When the cancer recurred in 2006, she continued to work while undergoing treatment and coached the Reading Olympics team at Truman.

Marigrace Bucher Komarnicki, 75, a soloist at Narberth Presbyterian Church for 40 years, died of cancer Feb. 27 at her Radnor home. Mrs. Komarnicki grew up in Mount Joy, Lancaster County. She graduated from high school there in 1951 and from Elizabethtown College in 1955 with a bachelor's degree in education. Mrs. Komarnicki taught kindergarten through second grade in the Manheim school system from 1955 to 1958 before moving to California and teaching the same grades in Upland and Long Beach, her daughter Kristyn Blancon said.