School Notebook: Contest Winners, Earth Day & More

Promising Young Writers. Michelle Sun and Michelle Hu, both 8th graders at Murphy Junior High School, have been recognized as national winners in the National Council of Teachers of English 2013 Promising Young Writers Program. The pair are two of the 211 students nationwide to be nominated to participate in the competition. Each submitted two pieces of work that were judged based on content, purpose, audience, tone, word choice, organization, development and style. English Department Chairperson Catherine Duffy congratulated the students, saying, "I speak on behalf of the entire English department when I say we are so proud of Michelle Hu and Michelle Sun being selected for this honor. We look forward to reading more of their published writings in the future."

Earth Day Fun at Nassakeag. Students at Nassakeag celebrated Earth Day in a variety of ways. The student council, led by adviser Adele Gibbons, coordinated Grounds Cleanup Day in which they collected trash from the school grounds. Students in Robyn Weinstein's sixth grade class launched a Waste-Free Lunch Week, in which they visited classrooms to share with fellow students the ways in which they could reduce the amount of waste produced during lunchtime. The result? Normally, Nassakeag students throw out about 50 garbage cans full of trash during the week, but during that week the students only threw out 28 cans of trash. 

National Merit Scholarship Qualifiers. Thirty-eight Ward Melville juniors have scored in the top three percent of students across the nation who took the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test, thus beginning their journey in the 2014 National Merit Scholarship Competition. The students qualifying are: Stephen Boukas, Charlotte Broadbent, Ray Chen, Sylvia Chen, Peter Chiang, Ethan Dorf, Arezu Esmaili, Ryan Gao, Luran He, Olivia Hu, Eidan Jacob, Emily Kaye, Henry Lane, Harrison Li, Dylan Lopez, Rachael Mayrose, Siavash Parkhideh, Ryan Patton, Julia Pinkava, Sahithi Reddy, Spencer Rosner, Alec Shangold, Alexander Shea, Rohan Sikdar, Akilesh Tangella, Philippe Tarjan, Alan Wei, Samuel Wu, Raymond Yin, Sandy Yin, Dan Yu, Eric Zhang, Caroline McBrien, Grace Molino, Krista Olson, Grace Zhang, Carolina Zheng, and Jennifer Zhong.