Resident lauded for community leadership

CORRECTION: A story published Friday, “Resident lauded for community leadership,” should have said Joe Rosener has lived on Lido Isle since 1959, and was a manager of high tech companies.

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The Orange County Human Relations Commission has announced that Costa Mesa resident Joe Rosener will receive a community leaders award for his work helping disadvantaged children in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District.

The award recognizes people or groups that have made an outstanding contribution to the community in the area of human or civil rights.

Ken Inouye, chair of the Orange County Human Relations Commission, described recipients of the award as “Orange County’s true unsung heroes.”

Eight years ago, at the age of 76, Rosener, a former engineer, started Community and School Collaboration, a nonprofit organization providing support to families whose children are having behavioral and emotional problems in school.

One of the organization’s programs, Families and Schools Together, encourages communication between families, teachers and school administrators. Its goal is to help students complete their education, and prepare them for the workplace so they can contribute and be a part of their communities.

Since its inception in 1999, teams of part-time employees from the group have met in multipurpose rooms at various elementary schools in the district in the evening, assisting parents from low-income families who spoke limited English to better understand the school system and expand their social contacts so they would be better equipped to help their children.

Rosener retired as chairman of the board in January, and says the work he did with children from preschool age up to sixth-graders in Community and School Collaboration was a “very satisfying way to have spent the last 8 1/2 years.”

Rosener will receive his award at a ceremony to be held at the Grove of Anaheim on May 3.