e belmont high school students over the past it was founded in two thousand and seven and over the past ten years we've given out about forty scholarships they started at two thousand dollars a year for students each year for two thousand dollars a  year last year they were up to three thousand this year they're going to be at thirty five hundred so it's the largest single largest scholarship given out to to any of the belmont high school students the organization was founded in two thousand and seven by a  group of graduates that were getting ready to celebrate their fiftieth high school union and i wanted to find a way to give back to belmont and it's been it's been going and growing very very well we currently have has close to twelve million dollars i think in newton has like seven million so the board of directors of the alumni and friends is targeting we're trying to get up to a million dollars as quickly as we possibly can and so we're raising money we lots of different ideas we send letters to all of the classes in for the past eight or ten years we've been focusing on classes that are hitting forty five years fifty years fifty five so foster what what would you like to add i think that you've covered it pretty well i live in wayland and we have a fund that structured differently and i've talked about this and most of the money actually comes from the people who live in wayland at a particular time so what we're trying to do with this vehicle is to reach out to community members in belmont and see if we can encourage them to contribute and then join the best of both worlds raise money from the alarm night and raise money from the community and one of the things that we're trying to do going to be using you guys is this suggests that we have these marvelous graduates and we want to really showcase what the high school has produced and i think that that's a really good way of reaching out and with thinking about doing a show a month and bringing in distinguished graduates and and we have many of them and so it won't be difficult to do that and we have two wonderful graduates it's really wonderful to see both of you makes my heart feel good so leslie would like to start with you and have you tell us a little bit about what you are doing now and perhaps as you get through that talk a little bit about your involvement so currently i am a neonatologist or baby doctor at mass general hospital i'm an assistant professor of pediatrics at harvard medical school and with that i have a very varied type of job and part of that is my own doing i don't think i could be a nine to five or so i've made it so i have lots of hands in lots of pots one of the things i do is work in the newborn intensive care unit there i've kind of decreased over the years a little bit my number of weeks there and one of the things i started focusing on was families going through a death of an infant and trying to offer some additional support and comfort a physician the only pediatrician on the on the comfort and support after last committee there and we do a memorial service and try to offer you know we've now come up with lots of we  treat death much differently now than we used to and so if it's going to happen we try to make it as good as it can be so we've had any spiritual leaders come in the family knows we've had dogs come in before the babies and so that's been you know my psychology background that's where i use them and then i am also working in the special care nursery which is a bridge from the intensive care to home and there we really help the whether it's been a premature infant or somebody with a congenital anomaly or heart condition or a lung problem after they don't need their ventilators anymore they still often need a lot of steps to get them home and again we really dig in and work closely with the families and get them more comfortable now caring for those infants additionally i'm the medical director both seven years ago open the newborn developmental follower program and i have i'm sure some of dr monet's patients and we follow any high risk infin from birth through the age of two well and that could be a primi substance exposed newborn baby who might have to have been on something called ecmo which is the highest level of care we have maybe a new needle stroke we've all their development i love it there it's not the i c u it's just playing on the floor with the kids and giving the parents as much guidance as they can get for how to you know help their baby roll or learn how to eat solid foods things like that and lastly if that's not enough is that i'm running the new natal abstinence in drone program so i there is as we all know there's a major opioid crisis and a lot of pregnant women are included in that opioid crisis so i counsel every woman at mass general who is on any opioids as to what to expect after her baby is born and then after the baby is born and we offer as much support the baby can go through withdrawal and we help the baby and then the mom and the baby try to kind of learn about each other and so that takes all a lot of my time so i'm pretty busy pretty busy schedule and i have to say i'm not surprised that you're doing this kind of work you something about that in washington a distinguished fellow of the academy of child and adolescent psychiatry so i think that this is a good connection i remember him offering help when the school went through a crisis and you know if you've been a high school for twenty five years you you're going to see just about everything and have to manage just about everything that can happen in a culture and he was always there  d never charged a cent and when you know those kind of services are very expensive he had such a remarkable way with young people he still has and he's such a funny he uses humor  energy level and i'm sure i was a kid who was passing a lot of notes around to my friends and yet you know they kind of worked with me rather than you know becoming  and and then in the middle school i think i was in love with my band teacher so i kind of remember that he didn't know i was alive which is good and then high school i just you know i had a lot of fun my freshman year in case you remember my pal kristen and then just kind of hunkered down and like even though there was a lot of fun to be had around and you could kind of there was a very i thought a very diverse population belmont high and we had a lot of fun getting to know different groups of kids playing sports and i was in a band and a lot of oh yeah yeah i loved the marching band and competing in the marching band and then kind of always knowing i have to kind of stay serious because i'm moving past this and it was worked out really well for bubba high school you would where to go if you missed so that's a little story but i went to university of michigan and it was i was a little big one that i actually got there where i think there's one hundred seventeen others are people that go to the table paul stadium and i remember telling my mom look for me the first televised game i'll be in the gold sweater with the blue writing and called you know there was no cell phones and so she's everybody was in there with gold writing so but i loved it there but it was just a little far away from home so then i transferred and graduated from b u but i was not pre med  i started working at mclean hospital right here in belmont with some troubled kids for a couple of years and then decided there was just something about the brain that fascinated me and i couldn't understand why a couple of different kids would be abused and act this way when other ones so so i currently were very close by the old santa maria hospital building which houses a few different things but i work in a small pediatric primary care practice there so that means i provide general medical care to children starting in infancy all the way through early adulthood so we have a rough cap at twenty one years and you know will gently nudge people out the door at that time when the so it's wonderful i've been there for almost ten years i'm one of four pediatricians now and when i started i was the second pediatrician it was just my boss and i and we had no nursing support we had one front desk assistant and i called my dad and said well this job interview came up i'm not sure what to make of it you know it's one pediatrician looking for help i'm going to either you know sink or do general pediatric medicine so primary care for children so it's a it's a medical office that serves children in the primary care setting meaning regular checkups simple sick visit sleep colds and flu ok experiences that made you sort of know that this is what you wanted to do and you were growing up yeah i think you know i had an interest in medicine from an early age after i was a patient myself but i really was able to foster that so nicely in high school with the sciences i got really into the science classes i took and i had phenomenal teachers for all three biology chemistry and physics and i really had colic i did twice and then he was amazing did you  of background that i needed was just having that interest and foundation in the sciences starting in belmont and then i also became very involved in various committees and just really found my my groove in high school yearbook i did some y remembered me and he had in his portfolio cannister this beautiful drawing he had done of flowers in a vase that he had had printed a large mat for a wedding gift and he'd had two copies extremely wealthy people but we've also got a feel for the number of people that are on the other end of the spectrum and when you go to belmont high school you get the entire class action of humanity you know and they do such a marvelous job  foster is helping us on this in a great deal as well as we want to put together a multiclass for union so i don't want to get as many of the students that live in the general belmont or greater boston area just to come back you know  twenty three you know my graduating class was three hundred twenty kids three hundred thirty kids and we had over one hundred of them still living about what i was telling and so i can't go anywhere i was climbing in switzerland jump on this one i did the right had i was i knew nothing about facebook until i want to spain to study and that's the way i talked or i've faced what do you call it yes fix whatever and then once i showed up all of these friending things and i didn't what sold nice about this town is that people pitch in you know it's a small enough town so that everybody sort of knows it and they ran these big fundraising things that put they put hours into it with you know black christmas thing that we used to do where they sold i don't know lots of stuff and it was just pretty phenomenal but you know i talked a little bit about some of the other experiences that were an academic i think of our theater program you talked about the marching band and yeah i started i'm not very theatrical but i really had a blast i did the senior class play what i think is such an amazing is on the body together experience and you know and you know after spending years at least high school if not you know you know elementary and middle school with so many of these acted here's the script and it was spilt chucker that's a big part and i'm saying how many days when there's just one she says in a week and so i got to be my first year in the play and it was a wonderful way of getting to