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“But now,” says the Once-ler, “now that you’re here, the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear. UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” – Dr. Seuss, The Lorax

In honor of USA Weekend‘s annual Make a Difference Day coming up this Saturday, I bring you a nice story about some Webster Thomas High School kids who are, indeed, making a difference.

For example, there’s Avery Maltman, Cara Macaig and Miranda Cain, who teamed up to clean up Kent Park.  And Scott Skarzynski, who’s collecting used toner cartridges and electronic gadgets for recycling. And Julian Zehr, who’s organized a shoe drive for the needy in Africa. And Mia Klasner, Emma Schaefer, Sarah Ball, Sarah Hurlburt, Ellie Songer and Danny Gresens, whose bottle and can drive is raising money for postage to send those shoes to Africa.

All of these kids are students in Cathy Anne’s Enriched Earth Science Class at Webster Thomas, and while they’re helping our world, they’re also doing their homework.

It’s all part of Anne’s “Pop the ‘Me’ Bubble and Make a Difference” project, a three-month long assignment where students have to come up with some sort of project to help the environment. It could be anything from planting trees to writing letters to Congress.

Anne began the unit with a movie: Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax, which chronicles the plight of the environment and how one grumpy little creature fights for it.

After watching the movie, Anne explained,

we talked about how the Lorax represents the conscience of a person and that we need to listen to our conscience and put aside our greed for the greater good.  We need to think past ourselves; pop our “me” bubbles. If we don’t start making a difference now, it will be too late.

The students were given a short list of possible ideas, and they ran with it.  The variety of projects the student devised and their depth of commitment is impressive, as illustrated in this email I received from Nathaniel Tsai:

Our assignment … was to help clean the world and make a difference. If one person wants to clean the world just that much, then in future, it could make a greater impact…Our class was given the choice to pick one activity out of a small list to do each month. The activities consist of planting trees, collect bottles/cans, start a recycling project, research alternative energy, and write letters to congress possibly about Hydrofracking, waste in the Pacific Ocean, etc.

We were also given the choice to do any other idea that we could think of. This is what I jumped on. For my “Make A Difference” project, I am doing all of those activities. But not only am I just doing them, I am recording my actions as well. This way, I can make a small video at the end of the project that I hope will influence others. My video will have some slight humor in it, but it will also be very impacting on others to help save the world. Even if it just is little by little.

This is the first year Anne has assigned a long-term project like this to her Earth Science students. But judging from their response, it will certainly not be the last.

“I was very impressed with how my students took to this project,” she wrote. “They came up with ideas and plans that are much more involved than I imagined. It shows you that these kids do care, about many things, and when they were given the opportunity to make a difference they embraced it and ran with it. It also shows that they are mature, responsible young adults who are more than just data — a test grade — and success can be measured in several different ways.”

Photos below are from the Kent Park clean-up effort by Avery Maltman, Cara Macaig and Miranda Cain

Once again a Webster resident has been recognized as being a stand-out in her field. In this case, a playing field.

Photo courtesy Democrat and Chronicle

In yesterday’s Democrat and Chronicle, the lead local story featured Webster Schroeder High School senior Hannah Harrison, who was recently named to the All-American Marching Band.  Hannah plays clarinet for the Webster High School Marching Band, and is one of only 130 musicians selected for the national honor.  She’ll travel with the All-American Band to San Antonio Texas in January, where they’ll play at halftime at the U.S. Army All-American Bowl, a national high school football all-star game.

Read more by clicking here for the on-line story.

You can watch Hannah perform for yourself this weekend when the Webster High School Marching Band hosts OPERATION BLUE, a day-long open house culminating with the annual Autumn Fanfare field band competition at 5:30 pm. Students interested in joining the band are encouraged to bring their instruments and participate in the day’s events. Parents will have plenty of opportunities to ask questions as well. Click here for more information.

According to Webster Thomas social studies teacher Greg Ahlquist, students are like a tube of toothpaste.

I’ll explain shortly what Ahlquist meant by that.  But suffice it to say, that kind of thinking is just one of many reasons Greg Ahlquist was named by the Board of Regents this week as the 2013 New York State Teacher of the Year.

Some of the hundreds of Thomas students and staff members who attended yesterday’s assembly.

Ahlquist made that analogy yesterday as he stood at a podium on the Webster Thomas stage, toothpaste tube in hand, and addressed an auditorium filled to capacity with Thomas students and staff members, administrators, Board of Education members, and local media representatives.  Ahlquist had officially received the award in a ceremony held Wednesday in Albany.  Yesterday’s assembly was a chance for the Webster Thomas family to congratulate him on his achievement.

Ahlquist is a Webster native and 1991 Webster Thomas High School graduate. He has been teaching social studies in the Webster School District since 2000, including AP World History, AP European History and a Holocaust elective. He currently serves as Lead Teacher for the entire Advanced Placement (AP) Program at Webster Thomas.

As New York’s Teacher of the Year, Ahlquist will represent the state’s more than 200,000 teachers, and speak at events around the state.  He is also in the running for the national award.

In 2007 Ahlquist was one of the five finalists for Teacher of the Year. He didn’t know he had won this year’s award until it was announced at the ceremony in Albany on Wednesday.

Ahlquist, center, with Webster Thomas principal Glenn Widor, Superintendent Adele Bovard, and students Douglas Pagani and Brenna Mason.

Now back to the toothpaste.  As Ahlquist displayed a thoroughly flattened toothpaste tube to the Webster Thomas audience, he described how he’d had to rescue it from his wife, who wanted to throw it away, assuming that no more toothpaste could be gotten from it. But he knew better. With some gentle coaxing and judiciously applied pressure, he could get another week’s worth of toothpaste out of that tube.

And so it is with students, he explained. “A great teacher sees potential (in a student) where others see very little.”

Congratulations, Greg.  You make the Town of Webster, the Webster School District, and Webster Thomas very proud.  I am honored to be a colleague.

(Photos courtesy Jen Calus, Webster Central School District)

Full-day kindergarten may be in Webster’s near future.

For the last several months, the Webster Central School District has been looking into the possibility of replacing the elementary schools’ current half-day kindergarten programs with full-day programs.  An advisory committee consisting of 80 parents, teachers, administrators and community residents has been meeting since March to review current literature on the subject, and visit existing full-day programs in Monroe and Wayne counties.

Now they’d like to get some input from the greater Webster community.  They’re inviting all residents to complete a short survey to gauge interest.  It’s only got a handful of questions, so it doesn’t take very long. A few of the questions are kind of confusing, but I expect it should give the district a general idea of where people stand.

The district stresses that a move to full-day kindergarten will not require the addition of classrooms at any of the schools.  What other costs will be involved, I can’t tell you.

The survey will be available through October 12, and can be accessed online by clicking here.  Hard copies can also be found in the main office of each elementary school.

The Board of Education will receive a report from the Full-Day Kindergarten Advisory Committee in November, which will include the community survey results, along with research and site visit findings.

It’s hard to go anywhere these days without hearing moms and kids or moms and moms chatting about the beginning of the new school year. And several of those conversations have involved the schools’ new start times.

If you have kids in the Webster schools, you certainly already know about the new start times. In past years, school start times have been staggered — for example, Plank North and Plank South started about an hour apart. This year for the first time, all the elementary schools in the district will open their doors within minutes of each other, around 9 am.  The secondary schools will start earlier, as usual, but will also all open at about the same time, around 7:30 am. (For details, check the WCSD website.)

I’ve heard the rationale behind this explained a few times, and am still trying to get my head around it. Here’s the official explanation from Carm Gumina, Deputy Superintendent of the Webster Central School District:

The State’s move to a new Common Core Curriculum and new assessments based on this Common Core was certainly a significant driverfor the change.  The opportunity to add 40-60 hours of core instructional time for our 4th and 5th graders in a way that is tax-neutral was just as significant.

How did we “add 40-60 hours of core instructional time?”   Activity period (band/orchestra/chorus/intramurals/art club) has traditionally been during the school day, and when 4th/5th graders would leave their classrooms to attend these activities, the core instructional day would essentially stop for that 45 minute block of time. Now activity period will be before school on Mon, Tues, Thurs, and Fridays (Wednesdays are meeting days for teachers).  Students signed up for their activities last May/June, but will be able to sign up when school starts as well.  Busing will be provided before school as well.

I’m told that because the activity period lands before the school day instead of middle of the day, kids will be less hesitant to leave classroom to do an activity. So the change creates opportunities for kids to try more things.

Carm’s detailed explanation doesn’t specifically address why the start times were changed for the secondary schools as well, but I know it is closely tied to the Common Core Curriculum and its recommendations.

These new start times will require some adjustment for parents. Some will appreciate the later start times that several of the elementary schools are implementing. But that will also mean later release times, which could affect after-school activities. For others, their children will have to get used to waking up an hour earlier, an idea which I’m sure does NOT sit well with the kids.  And it will be interesting to see what the traffic is like on Publisher’s Parkway in the morning with both Thomas High School and Willink Middle School starting within 15 minutes of each other.

Several elementary schools are also seeing some shifting in their populations this fall. Specifically, many Klem South Elementary students will be transferring to Schlegel and Dewitt, some Plank North students will go to Plank South, and some State Road students will go to Schlegel Road. The changes will affect somewhere between 115 and 125 students.

Director of Communications Ann Carmody explained that the changes are in response to recent growth in the Webster population, which has been steady in recent years, but favored particular neighborhoods.  Lately that growth has stabilized, so the district figured it would be a good time to reassign some of those neighborhoods and “rebalance” the schools to attain optimal class sizes.

I just found out about a neat project happening at Schlegel Road Elementary.

The school is expecting a lot of new families moving over from State Road and Klem South this year. A transition like that is always a bit difficult, so the Schlegel Road community has come up with a way to soften the blow. They call it their Adopt-a-Family Program. Basically, current Schlegel Road families are asked to “adopt” a family and make it a point to befriend them and accompany them to upcoming school events. It’s a very simple idea, but one that should go a long way to smooth the transition from old school to new. I love it, and I think every elementary school should do it.

If you’d like to find out more about this program, email lorisozio@ gmail.com by Monday August 27.