ENFIELD — Justin Alaimo walked into a hospital in August with symptoms he thought pointed to a bad stomach flu.

A little more than 24 hours later, his doctors told him his heart was failing and that he needed an emergency heart transplant.

To help cover Alaimo’s astronomical medical expenses, his mother, Jackie Lavoy-Alaimo, has organized the “Have a Heart for Justin” fundraising dinner and raffle. The event will be held from 4 to 10 p.m. Saturday at the Knights of Columbus hall at 371 George Washington Road.

Lavoy-Alaimo said the doctors at St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center in Hartford quickly put her son on a Life Star helicopter to Yale-New Haven Hospital, where he was connected to a machine that ran his heart from outside his body until a new heart was found.

Three days later, the new heart came, and a surgical team quickly got to work removing Alaimo’s failing heart and replacing it with the new one.

Although Alaimo hadn’t felt well for a few months before going to the hospital, he had no reason to suspect that he was anything but the healthy 35-year-old he seemed to be.

Lavoy-Alaimo called the situation the biggest scare of her life.

“When your son gets a heart, you’re not sleeping,” she said. “You don’t know what day it is.”

Five months later, Alaimo is doing surprisingly well, she said. He still hasn’t been cleared for vigorous exercise or to return to his job at the Angelo Lamagna Activity Center, where he worked as a counselor. But for the most part “you wouldn’t know he had a heart transplant,” she said.

Still, Alaimo and his family are facing massive medical bills. He had no health insurance when his heart failed, and the costs of a heart transplant are astronomical.

The necessary follow-up care also is expensive. It includes heart biopsies, which are invasive, risky procedures, and a lifetime of medication to prevent Alaimo’s body from rejecting the lifesaving heart in his chest.

The benefit dinner, which Lavoy-Alaimo said will include ziti, salad, homemade Italian bread, and cupcakes, costs $15 per person.

Tickets for the raffle cost $5 for three and $10 for eight. Among the items to be raffled off are a one-year membership donated by Planet Fitness, meals at the Hazard Grille or the Country Diner, and a $50 gift certificate from the Growth Co. flower shop. Lavoy-Alaimo said volunteers are also donating gift baskets — and that she is still accepting raffle donations.

A bank account has also been created for cash donations. To make a donation, send a check made payable to “Have a Heart for Justin” to Sovereign Bank, 800 Enfield St., Enfield, CT 06082.

For more information, contact Lavoy-Alaimo by phone at 860-798-1252 or by email at

jackiejbb@yahoo.com

ENFIELD — A Board of Education member objected on Tuesday to proposed changes to high school biology and philosophy classes, saying the new curriculum could promote a specific political agenda.

The board member, Kevin Fealy, a Republican, said he was concerned that a biology unit about the effect of human activity on ecology and biodiversity highlighted only the negative aspects of certain types of power sources, such as nuclear energy and petroleum. He said the curriculum should show “both parts of the argument” about those issues.

Fealy said that the revised curriculum as written could afford teachers enough latitude to “create a climate that espouses a specific political agenda.”

Kevin Fealy

“I’m not trying to negate this from the classroom,” Fealy said at Tuesday’s board meeting. “I want a clear delineation between what teachers can and cannot teach.”

One of the units Fealy criticized seeks to teach students that “human activity can have positive and negative environmental impacts.” Students would also “explore how oil spills affect ocean/marine life” and “examine the potential harm or threat of nuclear energy” using the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown in the former Soviet Union as an example.

Fealy said those lessons seem to teach the subject from a certain point of view. He said he has children in the school system and doesn’t want any children to be in a “tug of war on these issues.”

“For two years, I’ve been dealing with teachers in the schools that have agendas that have nothing to do with the curriculum that they are putting forth to my children,” he said.

Board Chairman Timothy Neville noted that the summary the board was considering highlighted only revisions to the curriculum and that he felt the topics went both ways.

When asked how the school system could balance the biology units, Fealy said that both sides of issues should be explored. That should be the schools’ policy on all controversial issues, such as climate change, saying that on that issue, “I don’t think the science has been settled.”

“There are conflicting points of view on climate change,” he said. “If we want to raise the issue of climate change in a classroom with a high school-age child, then I think we should approach it from the position of ‘here is one point of view, here is another point of view.’

“Based on one point of view, they back it up with this logic, this reasoning, and on the other side is the other point of view and you back it up with this logic, this reasoning. Then I believe you as a teacher have done your job.”

School Superintendent John Gallacher said that the system’s curriculum director, Linda Cavanaugh, would review the revisions with department heads and teachers to see if any changes were warranted.

“We’re not just saying ‘you’re the teacher, you can teach whatever you want,’” Gallacher said.
Cavanaugh said that, because of constantly changing state standards, “the curriculum is always in a state of revision.”

She said that after administrators and teachers review the concerns highlighted by Fealy, it “may or may not be revised” before they bring it back to the board.

Fealy also asked for changes to proposed revisions to a philosophy class. He said he wanted a list of the philosophers the teachers planned to discuss because he is concerned with the latitude afforded to teachers. They could, for example, use Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara as a philosopher.

The board ultimately approved the philosophy curriculum by a 7-1 vote with Fealy voting against.

Board member Charles Johnson said that while he understood where Fealy was coming from, he wouldn’t want to undermine the students’ ability to discuss other unconventional figures some people might not consider philosophers such as “Peanuts” creator Charles Schultz.

Neville also said that producing a complete list of sources for any curriculum would be difficult.

Fealy said that some of the proposed discussions in the philosophy curriculum, such as a discussion about the existence of God, would be “treading on thin ice.” Neville said that a major goal of the school system is to teach students critical thinking skills.

“I think we’re treading on thin ice if we try to set an agenda about what we can and cannot teach,” Neville said. “In my mind, that’s censorship.”

This is not the first time Fealy has made a public call for political balance. Last January, Fealy was the first of several residents to ask that the Enfield Public Library cancel a planned screening of the film “Sicko,” filmmaker Michael Moore’s 2007 Academy Award-nominated documentary that critiqued the American health care system.

Enfield made headlines all over the world after the screening was canceled under pressure from the Town Council. The film was eventually screened as part of a revamped film series that included additional films offering opposing political viewpoints.

Enfield Prayer Shawl Ministry sends warmth to soldiers, others in need

By Marcus Hatfield
Journal Inquirer

ENFIELD — Jeane Roberts holds up two knitted skullcaps — one brown, one gray — that she says can be worn under a helmet.

“It gets very cold there,” she says of Afghanistan. “They’re even sleeping with them.”

The caps are among 20 that she will give to her nephew, Master Sgt. Chris Kellam of the U.S. Air Force, who is based in Afghanistan. Kellam will distribute them to other soldiers stationed there.

Roberts is the founder of a group that meets every Wednesday on the lower level of Calvary Presbyterian Church on King Street, creating knitted items that they donate to a number of groups, including soldiers, charities, and health care facilities.

Read more at the JI’s website…

By Marcus Hatfield
Journal Inquirer

ENFIELD — After close to six years of service, a well-known member of the Enfield Police Department will retire this spring, at the ripe old age of 9.

Niko, who has worked as a patrol dog since 2006 and was trained to sniff out narcotics the following year, will retire in April or May once his replacement, 1-year-old Brady, begins his patrol training.

Chief Carl Sferrazza said that while Niko is by no means frail — his barks from the back of a cruiser are enough to make some people more cooperative when encountered by police — it wouldn’t be fair to keep him on active duty too much longer. Niko has problems with his hip and with his back, the latter possibly due to being hit by a car in 2006.

“I think it’s time for him to become a couch dog,” Sferrazza said. “He deserves it.”

Read more at the JI website…

By Marcus Hatfield
Journal Inquirer

ENFIELD — Larry Shortell has been to all 50 states, visited 80 countries, and has stepped foot on all seven continents, including Antarctica, at least twice.

Now, Shortell, a 47-year-old special education teacher for Winsted schools who lives in Enfield, has written a book about his global travels, “Summers Off: The Worldwide Adventures of a Schoolteacher.”

Shortell has made two round-the-world trips — in 2000 and 2006 — and plans to take a third next year. But he doesn’t wait for his circumnavigating adventures to travel; this past summer, in addition to traveling through the South, he went to Honduras to look for whale sharks, but he didn’t find any. He did get to swim with dolphins and snorkel with pilot whales, though.

The trips started as scuba expeditions; before he began teaching 14 years ago, Shortell worked as a scuba instructor. He picked out his first destinations based on things he’d read in diving magazines, but added other spots to his list after learning about them from fellow travelers.

Travel became a lifelong passion for Shortell about 20 years ago, when a close friend drowned and he nearly did, too. He said that was a “turning point” in the way he lived his life.

“Instead of work, work, work — if there’s something I dream of doing, I’m going to do it,” he said.

Read more at the JI’s website…

To find “Summers Off” on Amazon.com, click here.

To find Shortell’s blog, with dispatches from around the world, click here.

ENFIELD — The Board of Education has refused a settlement offer from the American Civil Liberties Union that would have put an end to the group’s lawsuit over the schools’ plan to hold graduations at a Bloomfield church last year.

Vincent P. McCarthy of the American Center for Law & Justice, the organization representing Enfield public schools in the dispute, said that the school board felt that what the ACLU of Connecticut proposed wasn’t a settlement offer in that it “just reiterated what they wanted in their complaint.”

“There was no offer of a settlement in the sense that a settlement offers something to the one side and the other side offers something back,” McCarthy said.

Read more at the JI’s website…

ENFIELD — Psychologist Michael Schultz told the more than 200 people who gathered for a meeting on suicide prevention Wednesday night at Enfield High School that, more than anything else, “families make the biggest difference in our lives.”

“One hug from a mother is worth a thousand therapists,” Schultz said.

His presentation was part of a meeting that town and school officials said was the first step of the community’s response to the recent suicides of two teens associated with Fermi High School. Dillon Barnaby, 17, who had dropped out of Fermi, committed suicide on Nov. 30, just 30 days after the suicide of 17-year-old Meghan LeRoy, who was a senior at the school.

Read more at the JI’s website…

By Marcus Hatfield
Journal Inquirer

ENFIELD — Dale Gregoire got an early start to her career in education.

When she was 13, she started a summer camp with a friend to teach other children — their younger siblings, their parents’ friends’ children.

They started out in her friend’s basement, and for three consecutive summers they put on the camp, which finished each year with a play at the end of the summer. Asked now how she managed to put that all together at that age, she laughs.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess we must have talked to our parents beforehand.”

Read more at the JI’s website…

Hey, Enfield residents: Do you have an impressive display of Christmas lights at your house? If so, send us a picture and we’ll run it on our blog and Facebook page. (Send us a high resolution photo and we just might run it in the paper, too.) Just be sure to include your name and the street you live on so you get credit for your hard work and your neighbors know where to go to check it out!

By Marcus Hatfield
Journal Inquirer

ENFIELD — The 1,300 Christmas lights hanging on the front of Jeffrey Myjak’s Sharp Street home are LED bulbs, so combined they only draw 44 watts of power — less energy in many cases than a single incandescent bulb — and add just about 4 cents to his power bill each day.

Myjak, chairman of the Enfield Clean Energy Committee, said the town could take advantage of those and other energy-saving technologies if it improves communication between his committee and the departments that manage the town’s facilities and equipment.

Read more at the JI’s website…