Bank Street College
of Education Honors Irma & Paul Milstein & President
Augusta Souza Kappner
Recently, the Pierre Hotel was the
site of an elegant dinner to honor the philanthropy of Irma
and Paul Milstein as well as a decade of President Augusta
Souza Kappner’s visionary
leadership. The President’s Medal and honorary doctorates
by the Bank Street College of Education was awarded to the
Milsteins in honor of their support of educational initiatives
and their philanthropic leadership in New York City.
Paul Milstein, a renowned real estate
developer, pioneered the revival of New York’s Upper West Side in the 1960s
and 1970s. He and his wife, Irma Milstein, are just as renowned
for their major philanthropic activities in NYC over the past
two decades. She said, “New York has been good to us;
we want to be good to New York.”
The education and corporate communities
turned out in record numbers to acknowledge and deliver panegyrics
for Bank Street’s
outstanding work in training new teachers, working with school
communities and indeed “Leaving No Child Behind.”
Praises were delivered by Joel Klein, Dennis Woolcott, Richard
Parsons and Sue Kaplan, Chair of the Board of Trustees of Bank
Street while Vartan Gregorian, Regina Peruggi and several Milstein
family members looked on.
A quote of the founder of Bank Street,
Lucy Sprague Mitchell, which graced the program cover, was
very much in evidence: “Our
credo demands ethical standards as well as scientific attitudes.
Our work is based on the faith that human beings can improve
the society they have created.”#
