CHEF carnival cancelled
By ROBERT LINNEHAN
The Cherry Hill Sun
8/1/2010

Efforts to revive a past annual township carnival were stopped two weeks ago. The Cherry Hill Education Foundation announced it has cancelled its fund-raising carnival, which was scheduled for early August.

Vice President of CHEF Dennis Davidow said the carnival was cancelled because of unresolved contract and licensing issues. CHEF is an organization within the township that provides grants for Cherry Hill School District teachers

Several months ago, CHEF and the Garden State Rotary Club decided to resurrect the Cherry Hill Carnival, an annual event that was discontinued 15 years ago. Traditionally the carnival was held each summer in the parking lot of Kennedy Hospital, Davidow said. But, the hospital was expanded and the parking lot was drastically reduced in size so the carnival had no site.

“The concept was that we would be splitting the profits from the carnival to help both the Rotary causes and the grants that we support,” Davidow said.

CHEF scheduled the carnival at the Cherry Hill East High School parking lot and hired a carnival company through Aug. 18 to 22. However, Davidow said CHEF was about 60 to 70 days away from the set date and it still was struggling to receive the necessary licenses to hold the carnival.

The date could not be pushed back, Davidow said, as this was the latest week the carnival company could be hired in August. Any later and school would have started and the school’s parking lot wouldn’t be available.

“We had to make the determination and maybe risk not having the licenses. All of these groups would have put a lot of time into putting their booths together for the carnival, and we would have had to cancel the carnival if we didn’t get the licenses. We decided to hold off and start planning for next year and make sure we had everything,” he said. “Based upon the board of trustees for the CHEF and the committee that was working among the Garden State Rotary, both groups decided that it was better to hold off than risk people putting a lot of work into this and then at the last minute have to cancel because of the licenses.”

CHEF was counting on the carnival to generate a decent amount of funding, Davidow said.

Since November of 2007, CHEF has tried to fund as many of the grant applications coming in from teachers and staff in the school district as it possibly can.

Some of the examples of the grants awarded include peer tutoring programs, science programs, after-school activities for autistic children, and recycling and compost projects.

Davidow said the carnival would definitely take place next year in the summer.

“Whatever funding came in obviously would have helped. But, in the last two-and-a-half years we’ve raised $230,000 for teacher grants,” Davidow said. “We are still reaching out to corporate sponsors, we have our own fund raisers, and we will work closely with the Rotary in the coming years for other sources of funding.”