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| FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 3, 2010
Germantown Friends School has received a momentous gift from a loyal alumna, to be dedicated to the school’s long-standing Community Scholars Program. Janet Rosenwald Becker of St. Louis, GFS Class of 1948, has made a gift of $2 million toward the endowment for the Scholars Program.
“The Janet Rosenwald Becker Scholarship Fund will offer an outstanding
pre-collegiate education to generations of promising students,” stated Richard L.  Wade, Head of Germantown Friends School. “Janet Becker's gift honors her GFS education and her life-long commitment to equity and justice."
As a student at Germantown Friends School, Janet joined Quaker Weekend Workcamps, working alongside tenants of low-income housing to paint, plaster and make repairs. “What was so good,” she said, “was that it gave us the opportunity to see a tiny bit of how people lived who didn’t have the advantages we had – it allowed us to work with them, and learn from them.” Through her GFS experience she became “hooked for life” on developing decent and affordable housing.
A longtime supporter of Germantown Friends and its groundbreaking Community Scholars Program, Mrs. Becker saw the need to build the program’s endowment. Founded in 1965, the program enrolls qualified students of color from the community, assuring their education through graduation. Currently, 28 Community Scholars are enrolled in the K-12 school, and a total of 166 Community Scholars have graduated. In 2003, the program received the Leading Edge Award in Equity and Justice from the National Association of Independent Schools. The GFS Community Scholars Program is a model for other schools across the nation who have developed similar opportunities for talented students from less privileged backgrounds.
With the $2 million increase in the Community Scholars Program endowment, GFS will be able to maintain the strength of the Community Scholars enrollment in grades K-12. The gift comes at a particularly significant time as the need for tuition assistance at private secondary schools, colleges and universities has grown in the last two years.
Mrs. Becker, who has described herself as “a community activist at large,” is credited with bringing systemic change in matters of race and poverty to the St. Louis community. With a lifelong passion for fair housing, she served as founding director of Adequate Housing for Missourians, working in both local and legislative arenas. The Ethical Society of St. Louis presented her with the James F. Hornback Ethical Humanist of the Year Award in 1993 “for advancing the cause of Ethical Action on a broad, continuing basis, and especially for her leadership in low income housing.”
Her husband, Dr. Bernard Becker, is former head of ophthalmology at the Washington University School of Medicine. Her father, Lessing J. Rosenwald, was chairman of the board of Sears Roebuck and Co. and a collector of rare books and art. He donated the family home in Jenkintown, known as Alverthorpe, to Abington Art Center.
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