Students at Point Pleasant Borough HS Watched Rep. Smith Deliver His Remarks
Rep. Smith honored the students on the House Floor
On the House Floor on Thursday, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) congratulated four students at Point Pleasant Borough High School—Luke Boylan, Theresa Cardone, Jaspreet Kaur, and Adrian Wittmann—and their teacher Nick Gattuso, for their app “Lunch Buddy” which won first place in the 2017 Congressional App Competition. The app connected special needs students at their school with fellow students to sit with them at lunchtime, fostering friendship and inclusion. Below are excerpts of his remarks “Lunch Buddy App Builds Friendships”:
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize and congratulate four exceptional students from New Jersey’s Point Pleasant Borough High School—Luke Boylan, Theresa Cardone, Jaspreet Kaur, and Adrian Wittmann—for their amazing app designed to ensure that their classmates with special needs have a lunch buddy to build friendships, share conversation, laugh or talk about each other’s hopes and dreams.
Lunch Buddy app helps make all participating students more understanding, knowledgeable, kind and empathetic.
Lunch Buddy app helps all participating students see the world from each other’s eyes. Everyone has good days and bad, strengths and weaknesses, and things we want to talk about to a friend.
For many, high school can be difficult and lonely.
Lunch Buddy app recognizes this and enables participating students to better grasp the God-given worth and inherent value and innate goodness of everyone, and says with neon lights: you’re welcomed and cherished here.
Working together—under the incredible guidance of their advanced software engineering teacher Mr. Nick Gattuso—Luke, Theresa, Jaspreet and Adrian created the Lunch Buddy app, which earned them the top prize in the New Jersey Fourth Congressional District’s 2017 Congressional App Challenge. Several weeks ago the team came to the Capitol where they were nationally recognized.
Mr. Speaker, I had the privilege of seeing the app in action when I visited the high school in February and was struck by the extraordinary care and kindness of the winners, and frankly all the students in the class. These young people are truly amazing.
Allow me Mr. Speaker to say a brief word about the teacher Nick Gattuso.
After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Mr. Gattuso was so inspired by the selflessness of so many, that he left a highly successful career at Bell Labs and took an early retirement and huge pay cut to teach, because he said he just wanted to give back to others. He said he was too old to be a firefighter, too old to be a cop but chose the noble profession of teacher.
Today, with great skill, energy and passion, Mr. Gattuso teaches his students, in his words, “how to use their programming, engineering and problem-solving skills for good.”
Lunch Buddy app epitomizes that “good”.
Lunch Buddy app, Mr. Speaker, sprang out of a broader initiative to create a better learning environment for students with disabilities.
In 2012, Point Pleasant Borough High School established the Panther Assisted Learning Software, or “PALS”, with the stated goal of “providing students with multiple disabilities differentiated assistive learning technologies and to promote increased independence and vocational sufficiency.”
Additionally, PALS was created to “overcome specific barriers to learning,” and to facilitate “increased interaction between special needs students and their non-disabled peers.” It is a wonderful program that teaches important lessons that last a lifetime, and I believe this program needs to be replicated in every high school in the country.
Lunch Buddy app is one of several real world, operational apps that are enhancing the learning and community environment at Point Pleasant. Other apps, for example, assist students with their class schedules, money management, and resume building, and are developed in close collaboration with special needs students in the Life Skills class.
As you know, Mr. Speaker, the Congressional App Challenge itself was created to allow students in STEM fields, who also work in computer programming, an opportunity to showcase their software application achievements. These STEM fields are central to the global workforce of the future, and it is critical for our students to have opportunities like this to further develop their expertise in computer programming and work with teammates to enhance their collective creativity.
We all know that integrating into the academic and social environment at school can be difficult for many students, especially and including those with a disability. As the founder and co-chair of the Congressional Autism Caucus, I have heard stories from countless families with children with autism who struggle.
So I am especially grateful to our four designers of Lunch Buddy app who showed both great technical skill and great compassion. They put their expertise to the service of others.
Mr. Speaker, what they—and the other students in that class—have to offer, the world awaits.