Dr. Bryan Luizzi

‘I Can’t Wait To See What the Students Do’: Officials Cut Ribbon on ‘The Dome’ at NCHS

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District officials started talking about renovating “The Dome”—the planetarium at New Canaan High School—back in 2016, according to Superintendent of Schools Dr. Bryan Luizzi. They had a couple of false starts, including a key retirement and then COVID-19, but once they were clear of the pandemic, “we really committed to doing this, because we really feel strongly that we have this opportunity to create something special for our kids and for the community.”

“We’ve been looking forward to this day for years,” Luizzi told NewCanaanite.com as a crowd gathered outside The Dome for a formal ribbon-cutting on Tuesday afternoon. 

The ceremonial ribbon-cutting came as Luizzi led sessions inside the new space, introducing town and district officials, as well as donors and members of the diligent and hugely successful Dome Committee through demonstrations. Sitting in comfortable new seats that recline for a better view, those in attendance were led by Luizzi through not just interactive space exploration software but also videos showcasing The Dome’s immersive high-definition capabilities. 

“To be able to welcome in so many of the people that helped make this happen, that stuck with us through the years as we were building momentum and building the vision—it was all about getting it right, and having a vision that went beyond what a planetarium could do, to really the ‘immersive theater’ idea, and doing it in a way that asks people to think bigger than the small screen,” he said. “To do it together and collectively. So bringing everybody together to celebrate the opening is another way that we show what we believe, which is community.

Around Town

New Canaan Community Foundation Awards $650,000 in Grants

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The New Canaan Community Foundation celebrated its annual Grant Awards Ceremony Thursday morning, where the agency divided $650,000 among 80 local nonprofit organizations. NCCF Board Chair Sharon Stevenson said the ceremony provided a chance to “come together to celebrate and look forward to our shared work going forward.”

“This patchwork of investments is touching a broad range of needs in our community,” Stevenson said during the hourlong event, attended by more than 150 people and held in the Lamb Room at New Canaan Library. With its other grant programs, NCCF will invest more than $1 million dollars in grant aid this year. John Knight, the organization’s Distributions Committee chair, said the grant investments “depend primarily on the generosity of local donors.”

The 2017 Fundraising Appeal Committee, co-chaired by Sara and Spencer Schubert and Linda and Jay Twombly, led efforts to raise the donated funds. This year’s 92 grant requests totaled nearly $1.3 million.

Around Town

Ellen Brezovsky To Take Over as Executive Director of New Canaan Cares

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A licensed clinical social worker who for four years has overseen communications for a world-renowned psychiatric hospital in the town will take the reins next month at one of New Canaan’s foremost human services organizations. Ellen Brezovsky will start June 11 as executive director of New Canaan Cares, according to the nonprofit organization’s incoming Board of Directors chair, Sara Schubert. Brezovsky, most recently director of community relations at Silver Hill Hospital, brings wide knowledge of New Canaan families to the role, as well as qualities of creativity and collaboration, said Schubert, who also led New Canaan Cares’s search committee. “She has been working with 13 different communities, so her personal outreach and connections to programming and new speakers is going to be wonderful for us,” Schubert told NewCanaanite.com. Brezovsky said she was “very excited about the prospect of leading up Cares” and “to do justice” to what longtime director Meg Domino has helped build in some 17 years at the helm.

Business

Faith, Family and Fierce on the Court: Rose Kelley Karl

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[This is the second installment in a four-part series “Matriarchs of Main & Elm,” profiling the women behind New Canaan’s great business families.]

New Canaan’s Sara Schubert can remember walking through the woods as an 8-year-old girl to visit her grandmother, Rose Karl, at the Carter Street home that the family had built in 1926—the same year Rose’s own father, Henry Kelley, laid the cornerstone at the “new” New Canaan High School, now the police department. There, the woman whose leadership, wisdom and commitment to loved ones would make an indelible mark on an iconic New Canaan business and family, greeted young Sara with freshly baked cookies, milk and—characteristically—meaningful conversation. “I knew I wanted to be a school teacher, get married someday and have kids, and Grandma always told me that it should happen in that order,” Sara recalled on a recent afternoon. “She also told me to have a backup plan in case computers took over a teacher’s job, and this was back in the ‘70s. She was always so insightful, grounded and forward-thinking.”

One of 15 children born at the turn of the century to the prominent Kelley family of Carter Street, Rose would marry Leo Karl, Sr. at St.