Football honors holiday with local youth

Emma Rossi

Sports Editor

The Grove City College football team put down the playbook and picked up the picture books to read some of the classics to Hillview Elementary schoolers on Thursday, March 2.

The Wolverines participated in Read Across America Day, a National Education Association event when people across the nation visit classrooms and read aloud to young students.

Sophomore Dalton Foore coordinated the team’s involvement.

“I have class with Ms. Martin who is the principal at Hillview. She asked me if it would be possible to have the football team to come over to read,” said Foore.

Ms. Tammi Martin, the principal at Hillview Elementary School and adjunct professor in the college’s Education Department, spoke highly of the team’s work.

“The students were positively impacted by the genuine effort put forth by many of the readers. Children need positive role models and these college students demonstrated compassion and leadership.

Dalton Foore worked diligently to make this opportunity possible,” said Martin.

Thirty-seven members of the team read stories from Dr. Seuss and other classic authors to kids from kindergarten to fifth grade. Sophomore Dylan Lane was excited to see the team’s participation.

“It was so great to see everyone step up and sign up to read to the kids. Especially with it being an experience not many people have done before, it was great to see so many of our football guys sign up and want to make an impact in our elementary schools,” Lane said.

“It was just such a fun time reading to the kids and answering their questions. And it definitely has some of our guys wanting to look for more stuff to do in the community and schools.”

Foore noted the impact the day had on both the kids and the team.

“Across the team, we had a lot of fun. I was talking to guys on their way out and they told me about how much fun they had, how kids where having so much fun or that the whole class asked for autographs. A lot of the guys said they wanted to do it again next year,” he said.

Both Foore and Martin expressed the importance of the team’s involvement with the community. Foore saw the experience as an opportunity to live out Wolverine football’s vision, which is to glorify God through what they do.

Additionally, he further shares his insights as an acclaimed author, publishing notable works like “What is Man?,” “What is the Priesthood of Believers,” and “With All Your Heart: Orienting Your Mind, Desires and Will Toward Christ.”

In the opening of his lecture, Troxel shared the importance of understanding the significance of the heart in relation to faith. His thesis, which argued that faith born in the heart ought to reflect the values and nature of the heart, encouraged his audience to view the heart as a complex, integral part of our faith and trust in the Lord.

Troxel would continue to explain the physical and spiritual role the heart plays in our faith experience, citing that a comprehensive understanding of the heart as the center describes the com-

TROXEL 3

From the Tower

Our side of the story

In our previous print issue, The Collegian published a news article about the college administration’s response to each of the remedial actions as recommended by the Board of Trustees in its April 2022 Critical Race Theory (CRT) report. I want to provide some context in defense of the story, considering it caused quite the stir both on campus and Twitter.

Since November 2022, when the “Save Grove City” petition hit the Internet, we wanted to write an article, possibly a series of articles, about the CRT controversy and what the administration has done to address it. Since the petition’s signatories believed President Paul J. McNulty ’80 ignored his responsibilities outlined in the board report, we were curious if those claims were true, and so, chose to write the first story on that particular aspect. I feel we have done that.

We also wanted to write an article on the latest petition that was making the rounds, but we chose to wait until the document was submitted to the Board of Trustees as this development would be more newsworthy. However, it was not submitted to the board on Jan. 16, when the petition’s website said the signature process would be closed. The petition remained open for nearly another 50 days until the website was recently updated to inform its 711 signatories that the petition was in the process of being delivered to the board. So far, as of Wednesday night, there is no indication the board has received the document. That’s why we haven’t reported on this part of the story yet.

As for why we wanted to write the article(s) in the first place, I thought it would be important to lay out the facts for our readership, especially to those students on campus who were unaware of the latest happenings regarding the CRT controversy. We weren’t forced to write the story nor was The Collegian pressured to publish it on Feb. 24, even though some claimed that was the case. Quite the opposite, in fact. I chose to pursue it and get something published; no administrator held sway over me or co-author Ayden Gutierrez in printing the final article.

Furthermore, Joshua Abbotoy’s insinuation over social media that we were censored by the college is false. As an official publication of Grove City College, The Collegian does not have complete editorial independence and it is not unprecedented or even out of the ordinary for the administration to be involved in a particular story. We work with and have a responsibility to the college – our publisher – as well as our readership.

All this to say, getting the story published was a frustrating process since we didn’t have enough turnaround time in a given week to fully approve it for publication, and I have been quite disheartened by the accusatory responses, both online and on campus, from those who weren’t involved in the process.

Perhaps it would have been less of a headache for The Collegian to ignore the CRT controversy, but I chose not to. So, here we are. We’ll see where we go from here.

David Zimmermann Editor-in-Chief

Collegian Staff

Editor-in-Chief David Zimmermann