Elizabethtown townlively.com
MARCH 13, 2024
National
Day
SERVING THE LOCAL COMMUNITIES SINCE 1954
VOL LXV • NO 5
Look Inside
Fun for everyone at Eggstravaganza BY CATHY MOLITORIS
Dr. Sara Atwood speaks to students at the start of Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day at Elizabethtown College.
Introducing girls to engineering
S
peaking to an auditorium full of high-school girls, Dr. Sara Atwood recalled a story about the early days of seatbelts. The male engineers designing the device, noted the Dean of the School of Engineering and Computer Science at Elizabethtown College, neglected to consider the needs of pregnant women when making the safest seatbelts possible. “We care about having every perspective in the room,” Atwood told the girls. That’s the motivation behind Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day on the campus. The second annual event was held in late February, drawing girls
from 10 area high schools, including Penn Manor, Elizabethtown, Warwick, Columbia, Garden Spot, Hempfield and Conestoga Valley. “As a girl in engineering myself, I’m especially proud of this effort by E-town’s new Society of Women Engineers Student Section to ‘Educate for Service,’ which is our motto here at Elizabethtown College,” Atwood s aid. L a st ye ar, or ganiz ers planned on hosting about 30 girls, and the seats filled up immediately, so they expanded the program this year. “It’s exciting to see the tremendous growth in just our second annual offering of this event,” Atwood shared, noting that about 100 girls were in attendance. They
rotated through four workshops, including making mechanical inchworms, “Pac-Man Coding” and creating water filtration systems. “My favorite class in high school was English,” Atwood told the assembly at the program’s start. “There are a lot of ways to be an engineer and a lot of different paths to get there. You can love to write and be an engineer. Calculus does not have to be your favorite class for you to be an engineer. You have to be able to do the math, but you don’t have to love it. Don’t think about what you want to be. Think about what you love to do.” For Columbia High School students Mar Mendoza and
GEARS’ annual Eggstravaganza will feature egg hunts for people of all ages.
can redeem at the prize table. Some of the prizes in this year’s hunt are gift cards from downtown stores, Squishmallows and other stuffed animals, backpacks and Ner f guns.” The grand prize for the adult See Eggstravaganza pg 3
MESA will provide ambulance service BY CATHY MOLITORIS
Access to emergency services is an essential part of any community, and for residents of six municipalities in Lancaster County, a new system will ensure services continue. After a two-year process of study, public meetings and planning, the Municipal Emergency Services Authority of Lancaster County (MESA) debuted in February, providing 911 emergency medical ambulance services
in the northwest region of the county previously provided by Northwest EMS. “As far as we know, MESA is the first municipal authority in Pennsylvania that is publicly funding EMS services by charging a fee,” said Debra Dupler, MESA board chair. “In fact, we have already been contacted by other municipalities in the commonwealth and across the United States interested in the authority model as a solution to their own EMS funding challenges.” See MESA pg 3 R102845
See Engineering pg 7
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BY CATHY MOLITORIS
“As a nonprofit, our first priority is to give back to the community,” said Lee Eckert, recreation director for GEARS. The organization will do just that when it hosts its annual Eggstravaganza at Elizabethtown Community Park, located off Mount Joy Street, on Saturday, March 23. The event will feature free egg hunts for children ages 6 months to 12 years old as well as a free senior citizen egg hunt for people age 60 and older. An adult egg hunt for people age 13 and older will be offered for a small entry fee. Egg hunts will be held for various age groups every 15 minutes starting at 10 a.m. through 11:45 a.m., when the adult egg hunt will be held. “Through anonymous community donations, we have prize eggs,” Eckert said. “In the prize eggs are slips which you