St. Agnes Dinner Dance returns after a three-year hiatus

The St. Agnes Cathedral School’s Dinner Dance will be held at the Long Island Marriott in Uniondale on Feb. 4, following a three-year hiatus necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic.

Cecilia St. John, principal of the Rockville Centre school, said she was looking forward to once again spending an evening in the company of friends and family from the school community.

“It’s our biggest event of the year,” St. John said. “It’s a night where we honor our past parents and benefactors for their continued support and commitment to the school.”

The annual event recognizes members of the school community for their continued support for Catholic education. This year’s honorees include Carmine and Lynda Rubino, who will be presented with the St. Thomas Aquinas award for their ongoing contributions to the St. Agnes grammar school.

The Rubinos said that when they moved to Rockville Centre in the 1990s, they were considering placing their kids in the public school district, but changed their minds after attending an open house at the St. Agnes school.

“Our minds were made up after walking around the school,” Carmine told the Herald.

Having both attended Jesuit colleges, the Rubinos felt that St. Agnes was a much better fit for their children’s grade school education.

“We’ve always been very involved in St. Agnes,” Lynda said. “It came to kind of feel like home.”

She added that while public schools are funded by property taxes and state aid, Catholic education relies on the donations of the school community to cover operating expenses and help lower the cost of tuition.

“Catholic schools don’t have the same funding,” Lynda said. “Parents really have to show their support in order to make sure that students have the resources they need.”

To help raise money for the school, the Rubino family arranged a performance in 2010 featuring the Irish tenor Ronan Tynan, whose stirring rendition of “God Bless America” helped him become an official member of the New York Yankees franchise. The recital drew a large crowd to the parish center, many of whom came to see Tynan perform with the St. Agnes choir.

Lynda Rubino is an accountant with the firm Ernst and Young, and Carmine is the managing partner of a Manhattan law firm.

Honorees Bernard and Margaret Mary O’Connell will be presented with the St. Catherine of Siena Award for their continued support of the school, its teachers, and parent organizations.

The O’Connells have helped plan the dinner dance for 12 years. “It’s a great night,” Margaret said. “A lot of people are working very hard to put this event together.”

She added that her family has been a proponent of Catholic education in the community for the past two decades. All four O’Connell children graduated from St. Agnes, and both parents have served on the Board of Education. They have also taken part in several of the school’s annual events, including the Garden Potpourri and Breakfast with Santa.

Margaret, herself a St. Agnes alum, is a real estate agent for Daniel Gale Sotheby’s in Rockville Centre. Bernard, who is also the product of a Catholic education, works for the Royal Bank of Canada. He has been the treasurer of the St. Agnes Fathers’ Club for the past eight years.

The Rubino and O’Connell families acknowledged that the impact the school has on the success of its students is the result of its excellent leadership and the compassion and dedication of its teachers and staff.

Frances Barricelli, the library-media specialist at the St. Agnes School, will be presented with the St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Award, in recognition of her 18 years of service to Catholic education.

“I am completely humbled, overwhelmed with gratitude to be bestowed with such a highly regarded honor,” Barricelli said. “Over the years, I have been granted the gift of teaching students from such loving and supportive families.”

As an educator, she said, she wears many different hats, teaching students from kindergarten through eighth grade about literature, search engines, and iPad skills, sprinkled with creative twists on technology. Barricelli has also been involved in numerous community service projects, which have helped provide art supplies for SIBSPlace, a free program facilitated by Mount Sinai South Nassau hospital, dedicated to helping people cope with severe illness. And she has helped provide backpacks and school supplies for children in Uganda.

“I love what I do. It’s just an open book with endless possibilities,” Barricelli said. “I am a person who helps to nurture my students’ Catholic identity while simultaneously tapping into their individual interests. Family, faith, and learning, all intertwined.”

This year’s dinner dance will also welcome two distinguished guests. Dr. William Kaelin, an alumnus of St. Agnes, was a recipient of the 2019 Nobel Prize for medicine, and Bishop Bill Koenig, of the Catholic Diocese of Wilmington, Delaware, is a former rector of the St. Agnes Parish.

Kaelin is now a professor of medicine at Harvard and a physician-scientist with the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. He was awarded the Nobel, along with Peter Ratcliff and Gregg Semenza, for their research on how cells sense and adapt to oxygen based on its availability.

Koenig was appointed rector of St. Agnes in 2009. His service concluded in 2020 when he was appointed the vicar for clergy of the Diocese of Rockville Centre. In April 2021 he was named bishop of the Wilmington diocese, succeeding the Most Reverend W. Francis Malooly.

For tickets, reservations, journal ads and more information on the upcoming dinner dance event go to StAgnes-School.org.