Bartlett woman receives award for leadership and mentoring

Rita Lopienski, community life director at Victory Centre of Bartlett, has earned the Illinois Association of Activity Professional's top honor, the Larry-Madge Award. The award recognizes Lopienski for her outstanding leadership in activities, for mentoring and inspiring others in the field and for actively supporting her local association with ideas and service.

Lopienski also directs music at Christ Community Church in Schaumburg, is president of the Activity Therapists Association and is president of Arts in Bartlett. Lopienski is also on the board of the U-46 Education Foundation, Hanover Township Mental Health Board, Bartlett Woman's Club and Bartlett Character Counts Coalition. She is an adjunct instructor at Harper College and on staff with the College of DuPage Older Adult Institute.

• The Illinois Parks and Recreation Association presented Scott McClaskey, center director at Lions Recreation Center, with its award for Community Center Director of the Year.

Nancy Prosser, Mount Prospect Park District's facilities manager, nominated McClaskey for the award, saying he is extremely fiscally responsible, always willing to assist colleagues with projects and events even outside normal work hours and has an excellent rapport with the staff he supervises.

• Palatine resident William Menegas received a $10,000 scholarship grant from the Panhellenic Scholarship Foundation Nov. 15, during the foundation's 2008 Awards Ceremony held at Cathedral Hall of the University Club of Chicago. Menegas, who was named among the 25 of Greek America's best and brightest, attends the University of Chicago.

• Rhonda Popko, and artist, painter and teacher, retired from teaching art at the Des Plaines Park District after 29 years.

Popko was the art teacher for the park district's Young Artists Studio Program, a program she designed as a continuing class, where the basics in color theory, line shape and drawing are emphasized and then built on in subsequent classes.

For the past 14 years, she has also been the full-time art teacher at the Science and Arts Academy in Des Plaines.

Her personal work explores a dye and resist method of painting on silk and she has recently shown her work at Artisan 133 in Mount Prospect and at the Feminist Ecology: Women and the Earth Show at the Koehnline Museum of Art at Oakton Community College.