Schools

Former County Commissioner Selected as BCCC Commencement Speaker

Charles Meredith III will be the commencement speaker during Bucks County Community College's graduation ceremony May 22.

More than 1,000 students will graduate from Bucks County Community College during its 48th annual commencement on May 22.

Former Bucks County Commissioner Charles Meredith III will be the commencement speaker. The ceremony gets underway at 6 p.m. in the Gymnasium on the Newtown campus.

Meredith was the publisher of the Quakertown Free Press until 1996. He served as the President of the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association and was a director in the American Newspaper Association.

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Meredith also served as a Bucks County Commissioner, director of Quakertown National Bank, chairman of East Penn AAA, chairman of the Lehigh Valley Community Foundation, past master of Quakertown’s Masonic fraternity, and president of the Quakertown Rotary.

He served in the Pennsylvania Army National Guard as captain of the Philadelphia City Troop.  He has been married for more than 50 years to Betsy Meredith, with whom he has three children. Active at age 79, including rowing on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, Meredith still lives in his childhood home in Quakertown, according to information from the college.

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Meredith will receive an honorary Doctor of Public Service degree, which will be presented by college president Dr. Stephanie Shanblatt and Board of Trustees chair Blake Eisenhart.

Graduate Julia Peoples of Doylestown will also speak. She was chosen to address her classmates in recognition of her outstanding achievements, according to information from the college.

Peoples, who speaks six languages, is a liberal arts major who aspires to earn a Ph.D. 

She was active in the college’s PiXi chapter of Phi Theta Kappa, the international honor society for two-year institutions. Peoples held several offices in the organization before taking over as president, and was chosen to represent the college as a member of PTK’s All-Pennsylvania Academic Team. Peoples was involved in several service projects, including a canned goods collection for a food pantry and the Tyler State Park clean-up project. 

The ceremony will feature live music from the BCCC Madrigal Singers, under the direction of Music Area Assistant ProfessorRochelle Reed, performing our national anthem.

Assistant Professor Jeff Baumeister will lead the BCCC Graduation Ensemble performing his own arrangement of “Pomp and Circumstance.” 


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