Attending a Guys and Ties, Girls and Pearls etiquette dinner at Tavolo are, left to right, Laynie Fisher, 12, of Sidney, Lynn Cox, 12, of Port Jefferson, and Adalyn Barger, 11, of Sidney. The meal event was held on Tuesday, Nov. 28. The Guys and Ties, Girls and Pearls program is made up of Sidney Middle School students that meet one or two times a month. The members learn about character building. The program focuses on name, team, word and community. Laynie is the daughter of Angela Mayl and David Fisher. Lynn is the daughter of Krystal Cox and Joshua Cox. Adalyn is the daughter of Mark Barger and Deborah Phelps.
Luke Gronneberg | Sidney Daily News
Attending a Guys and Ties Girls and Pearls etiquette dinner at Tavolo are, Leyton Goffena, 11, and Liam Bosslet, 12, both of Sidney. The meal event was held on Tuesday, Nov. 28. The Guys and Ties Girls and Pearls program is made up of Sidney Middle School students that meet one or two times a month. The members learn about character building. The program focuses on name, team, word and community. Leyton is the son of Brad and Stacey Goffena. Liam is the son of Zack and Sherri Bosslet.
Luke Gronneberg | Sidney Daily News
Sidney Middle School students attend a Guys and Ties Girls and Pearls etiquette dinner at Tavolo. The meal event was held on Tuesday, Nov. 28. The Guys and Ties Girls and Pearls program meets one or two times a month. The members learn about character building. The program focuses on name, team, word and community.
Luke Gronneberg | Sidney Daily News
By Charlotte Caldwell
[email protected]
SIDNEY — Sidney Middle School’s sixth-grade students were treated to a dinner at Tavolo Modern Italian at 101 S. Ohio Ave. as part of the Guys in TIES and Girls in PEARLS program on Nov. 28.
Along with free dinner from a special menu created by Tavolo to keep costs down for the group, the 45 sixth-grade students in attendance heard from a guest speaker who taught them etiquette at a public event and got to put the skills to use that they’ve learned from being part of the program for a year.
This was one of the last events for the sixth-graders involved in the program and was organized by Girls in PEARLS leader Julie Casiano, who is also the owner of Smoothie Life/Meal Prep Life. In December, the sixth-graders will no longer be involved in the group, and in January a new group of fifth-grade students will enter.
“The dinner at Tavolo was just an idea that I came up with randomly one day, because I was thinking the kids are going to be learning about etiquette and they’ve just grown and matured so much and I really take this program pretty seriously,” Casiano said. “I was just thinking it would be really cool to give them a chance to put what they’ve learned and give them a night out to experience something different and something special and make a memorable evening that they would remember for the rest of their lives. Most of the kids have never been to Tavolo or a fine dining restaurant so it was just something that we wanted to reward them with for being part of the program and give them a chance to put what they’ve learned into action.”
When the group holds events, everything is free for the students with the help of community donors, including the dress shirts and ties for the boys and the real pearl necklaces for the girls. Casiano raised around $3,000 for the dinner, and some of the money also went toward buying sweatshirts for the girls to wear at the last event of the year.
“For the dinner, I knew it would be pretty expensive, so I reached out to my friends, my family, I reached out on Facebook to my social media community asking if anyone would like to help pitch in and sponsor a kid to go have a dinner experience, and people were just so generous and so many people jumped on board, so I was able to collect enough donations to pay for the dinner and even have money left over that we’ll probably do the same thing with the fifth-graders. So really the people of this community and my friends and family are the ones that made this dinner happen,” Casiano said. “I reached out to Rocco, the owner of Tavolo, and asked him if he could accommodate this and asked him to come up with a special menu so we could get it at a good price to make this possible and he was 100 percent willing to make it happen and was really good to work with.”
Guys in TIES and Girls in PEARLS was created by former Sidney educator Tom Clark who leads the boys. He asked Casiano to lead the girls, and Big Brothers Big Sisters of Shelby & Darke County is also involved. The group meets a couple of times a month, usually at lunch, to eat together and hear from guest speakers. The boys wear ties and dress shirts and the girls wear pearl necklaces to school when they meet.
TIES stands for Trustworthy, Impactful, Empowered and Successful, and PEARLS stands for Purposeful, Empowered, Adaptive, Respectful, Leading and Successful, and the group’s core values are name/reputation, team, word and community. Specifically, “Session topics for TIES and PEARLS will include conversations such as the power of your name, the value of your word, how to dress for the occasion, how to avoid troublesome situations, breaking cycles, the importance of giving respect, how to be a part of a team (not just an athletic team), and how to be successful by being you,” according to an article about the program from April 5.
