School news
Welcoming our Madrid exchange students
WUHSMS is excited to welcome eighteen Spanish students and their sponsors, Juan Fernández and Patricia to our school this week. The students arrived Friday, September 26th and were picked up by their host families and students. Their school, Colegio Salesianos Paseo Extremadura, will be hosting WUHS students in April as part of the Woodstock-Madrid Exchange.
Students met with WUHSMS Co-Organizers Luis Villanueva and Anna Megyesi for an orientation and campus tour on Monday before joining their host students in classes. Their time here allows them to immerse themselves in American culture and language and develop connections with our school community.
In addition to attending classes with their host students, Mr. Villanueva organized a number of excursions for them to take in some of the highlights of Vermont. Students had a tour of the Marsh Billings Rockefeller National Historical Park in Spanish by the Advanced Topics in Spanish class, followed by butter making and ice cream at Billings Farm and shopping in the village.
The group went kayaking on Wednesday to experience firsthand the rich tradition of recreational tourism in the area and had a tour of Dartmouth College on Thursday followed by shopping time in Hanover.
Planting the future: A freshman's intro to CRAFT
By Isla Segal ‘29
This op-ed first appeared in the October 2, 2025 edition of The Vermont Standard
This past week, I was one of the dozens of kids from Woodstock Union High School that took a field trip to the King Farm to plant chestnut trees and make applesauce. CRAFT, which stands for Community and Climate Resilience Through Agriculture, Forestry, and Technology, is a program at the high school that focuses on nature and sustainability. Students can take classes, such as Economics and the Environment or Regenerative Agriculture, to get CRAFT credits. Once they earn 6 credits in this pathway, they graduate with a CRAFT certification on their transcript. Outside of the certification, the program offers opportunities such as the trip to King Farm, where we as students can work with nature and be out in the world, making a difference.
When we got to school on Tuesday morning, about thirty students gathered in the lobby and went up to the nearby King Farm. This is a property the Vermont Land Trust owns, and our school is partnering with them to do projects such as this one on the land. We stacked firewood and sliced apples that a class had picked at Billings Farm earlier that week, then started boiling them down to make applesauce.
An hour in, many more students came after attending their first class on campus. We talked about the history of chestnut trees and passed around seedlings and pieces of chestnut wood. We planted chestnuts because it’s a tree that has many uses, from wood for furniture to food to eat, and there used to be chestnuts in Vermont and throughout the east coast. They were wiped out about a hundred years ago by a blight. We hope that we can help bring chestnuts back by planting these trees, so we partnered with the American Chestnut Foundation. The small trees we planted grew from seeds harvested from a rare, wild, mature American Chestnut tree in Vermont. The seeds were propagated at our school in air pruning beds. Air pruning beds are raised garden beds with a mesh netting above the ground so that when roots grow through the netting, they dry out and die, causing a more dense root system. What we planted were baby trees, about a foot tall, with several leaves, and a root system about a foot deep. We dug holes into the ground, placed the plants in, and added a soil mix that had pine duff, which helps chestnut trees grow. We put tubes around the top of the tree to help protect it from deer browse and tied those tubes to a stake in the ground. Finally, we watered them and covered the surrounding ground with cardboard to limit weeds. I got to plant two chestnut trees, one in the field, and another in the woods above it, because we tried to plant in both open and forested environments to compare the resiliency of the trees. It was cool to plant multiple trees, because the first time, I was figuring out the process, but by the second time, my partner and I had techniques and we knew what to do. Overall that day, we planted about fifteen trees, and we’ll plant more next year as a part of a several-year-long project.
I find it awesome to have the King Farm property near our school, and I feel so lucky to be able to use it. Currently, some of the older CRAFT students are in a pilot class with the goal of working in collaboration with Vermont Land Trust to design a plan for the property that will incorporate sustainable growing and harvesting practices and make it more open to the community. I look forward to watching these plans unfold and become reality through my years at Woodstock and beyond when I come back to visit.
The morning was my first experience with CRAFT, as I’m a freshman, and it felt like a comfortable community, and the kind of people I want to be around. We had everyone from ninth graders to seniors, and they were all joking around as we sliced apples, or talking to me as we walked up the hill. There were so many different people there, with varied interests, who take different classes, or sit with different people at lunch, but we had all come that morning to be outside, and make applesauce, and get our hands covered in soil, and that brought us all together. I’m glad as I go into high school to have even more role models and friends from other grades, who I can look up to, or who I’ll know when I walk into a new class.
Yoh Theatre performing “Elektra”, October 3-5
You are invited to Yoh Theatre's performance of Elektra, by Sophokles, translated by Anne Carson, on October 3, 4, and 5. The production features 31 Yoh Players from grades 7-12.
This Greek tragedy speaks the following through the Greek chorus: "Do not breed violence out of violence." "Evil is a pressure that shapes us to itself." "Justice is coming." "Conviction is strong in me."
"I always love the opportunity to write music," says Marcia Bender, Yoh Theatre Director. For this play, she wrote three-part harmonies for the Stasimon, interludes between Episodes, for a six person core of the chorus (Lia Gugliotta, Tee Miller, Ella Hardy, Jay Allen, Grace Foley and Orly Agin), with dissonant harmonies that reflect the mood of the interludes. The full cast list is available on the Yoh Theatre website.
"In spite of the quotes I chose above, this is Greek Tragedy and does not end well!" notes Bender. "But our learning through this ancient storytelling propels us forward, strengthening our resolve to stand firm in our convictions, without violence."
Exploring climate change through the eyes of middle schoolers
Mrs. Bewick's structured literacy classes will be focusing on climate change. The book, Two Degrees by Alan Grantz is a story based on three different climate scenarios, Wildfires, Melting Tundra and Hurricanes.
Two Degrees explains the three different scenarios of climate change through the eyes of middle school student's. Our poster project is a way for our students to dive into the subject of climate change while gathering some background knowledge before reading the book as a class. Check out our beautiful poster collection in the hallway by the middle school gym.
Mr. Becker brings science to life
Eighth grade science teacher Ryan Becker engages students with his passion for science, turning abstract concepts into hands-on learning experiences. During their recent dry ice experiments, students observed solid carbon dioxide transform directly into gas, creating clouds of vapor throughout the classroom. Dr. Becker has taught in the middle school since 2004.
