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PA Cyber School employees raise $20,000 for Heart Walk
MIDLAND, Pa. –For Dr. Nick Trombetta, the fight against heart disease is personal. He’ll never forget the moment he was told his father had died of a heart attack at age 50.
“I was 21, just finished college, had a new car and my first teaching job with a starting salary of $8,800 dollars. My perfect life turned upside down in a matter of seconds,” recalls Trombetta, CEO of the PA Cyber Charter School and a team leader for this year’s Heart Walk in Beaver, Pa. “Unfortunately, my story is not unique; we all have a memory of someone who was taken from us unexpectedly by a heart attack. When the Heart Walk folks asked me to support this year’s fundraiser I couldn't refuse.”
Dr. Trombetta said he challenged employee teams at the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School to surpass the Beaver County record of $10,000 raised by a single organization for the Beaver County Start! Heart Walk. They doubled the record, raising more than $20,000 over a two-week period with a variety of local events, including selling funnel cakes, pasta lunches, heart bracelets, coupon books and tie-dye shirts, and raffling off prizes such as tickets to Steelers and Penguins games.
“I asked our Academy leaders to assign people who they felt could do the improbable - not the impossible – by raising $12,000, something no individual Beaver County organization had ever done before. I gave them my best pep talk and then I walked away and watched. They shattered the record,” he said.
Team captains in the $20,000 effort were Brenda Smith, Bill Schrum, Paula Bloor-Camp, Suzanne Girtino, Shane McCall, Kristi McCullough, Natasha Lee, Joyce Rose, Janice Gural, Jason Fruido, Diane Deangelis Druzak and Nancy Sims.
Adding $500 to the total by selling Italian sausage sandwiches was a team from the Midland Borough Police Department, led by Chief Joseph Ditri and Mayor Angela Adkins.
Combined teams from Midland Borough School District, led by school nurse Charlene Freund, and Lincoln Park Performing Arts Charter School, headed by Ken Deem, raised another $962 with a variety of fundraisers, including selling $10 coupons to employees for 10 “Jeans Fridays.”
A small army of 180 walkers, representing the school by wearing orange PA Cyber T-shirts, turned out for the Oct. 4 Heart Walk in Beaver, Pa.
“When you said ‘orange’ you weren’t kidding! You guys shocked me,” said Barbara Roth, American Heart Association division director for Beaver and Butler counties.
Last year’s Beaver County Start! Heart Walk raised $61,000, according to Roth, but this year’s total will approach $90,000. A final official tally will take weeks to calculate as late donations trickle in.
In an email message to PA Cyber employees, Dr. Trombetta described the moment that his life was changed forever by heart disease.
“I remember that December day quite vividly. I was in the cafeteria-turned-wrestling-room coaching the Quigley Junior High wrestling team. I was ending my student teacher stint at my alma mater when the head coach walked in to talk to me. Ed Driscoll was my high school coach and one of the most influential people in my life. I had decided in my sophomore year to become a teacher and a coach and one day come back and work alongside him and Coach Robert Babish. This was my dream come true as I had been offered a full-time position. Everything was perfect as I could ever want it to be.
“Many of you know the feeling firsthand and can share my experience of disbelief and grief, when was I pulled from practice and Coach Driscoll took me outside to tell me that my dad had just died of a heart attack at the age of 50,” Trombetta said.
Trombetta has made a commitment to serve as Beaver County Start! Heart Walk campaign chairman for the next two years, Roth said.
Speaking of the hundreds of PA Cyber employees and friends who organized the fundraisers or contributed to them, Trombetta said, “You are the champions of my heart.”
Roth said diseases of the heart and stroke — the nation’s No. 1 and No. 3 killers — and all other cardiovascular diseases, claim more than 870,000 American lives a year.
Research funded by the American Heart Association has yielded or contributed to many important innovations such as CPR, life-extending drugs (including clot-busters), pacemakers, bypass surgery, the heart-lung machine and surgical techniques to repair heart defects.