School news
Congratulations Coach Ramsey!
Ramsey Worrell has been named Vermont D3 Football Coach of the Year for the 3rd year in a row. He is a wonderful representation of our school and Statewide Athletic Community.
Congrats to Coach Ramsay and to team who proudly represented WUHS at this year’s DIII championship.
The latest news from C.R.A.F.T.
CRAFT Seniors Owen Whalen, Kody Lantigne, Maya Sluka, Sadie Boulbol, Sophia Rosenbach, Brody Allen, Kaitlyn Burres and Priscilla Richardson presented at UVPTC (Upper Valley Teaching Place Collaborative) Conference. Students shared a variety of experiences they have learned from in CRAFT including Stewardship Action Projects, Immersive Semester at the King Farm, German Exchange, creating CRAFT as a non profit organization, competing in Envirothon, CRREL project, service learning projects and studies in APES. The students were articulate, showed true leadership and represented WUHSMS extremely well! The adult educators they presented to were extremely impressed by all the incredible work they have done in their school and community.
Students in Regenerative Agriculture volunteered to pass out food from the Vermont Foodbank during our monthly community distribution. VeggieVanGo distributes 2 million pounds of food annually across the state and helps feed thousands of families.
Students in the CRAFT Immersive Semester volunteered at Sustainable Woodstock to help make window inserts that reduce home energy consumption. This program made inserts for 27 homes this year and in the past 4 years has made enough inserts to save up to 8,000 gallons of fuel oil.
Students in Regenerative Agriculture helped plant native seeds that will be cold stratified this winter, divided in the summer and sold next fall in our native plant sale. Students planted locally foraged seeds as well as ones from local seed companies to offer over 35 native plants to the community next fall. These native plants are well adapted to our region, require less water, no pesticide or fertilizers and create habitat for our native pollinator species. They improve biodiversity, can withstand floods and drought and bring beauty wherever they are planted.
CRAFT Immersive students have been planning for the future of the King Farm while also learning about permaculture design. During that process, students are learning about agroforestry practices and planting important native fruit and nut trees into the air pruning beds they made with the help of our garden and greenhouse manager, Abbie. Students helped plant thousands of seeds that will eventually grow into seedlings that can be planted to improve the ecological health and diversity of the forest as well as provide food for many species, including us!
Library news: Middle School Book Club reads The Lost Year
In this edition of From the Library, read about the Middle School Book Club's book The Lost Year, learn how to access to The Atlantic magazine for free, discover how the Mona Lisa vanished from our library, make time to check out the Middle School Art endangered species clay tile exhibit, discover how the Faculty/Staff Book Club immersed themselves in spycraft during their discussion of Book and Dagger and there's an event reminder for the Book Swap and Winter Party the Young Adult Diverse Books Book Club is hosting on Tuesday, December 9 during ARE time! To read more and see photos, please click here.
Students take on art heist
In shocking news this month, our school suffered an immeasurable cultural loss when four priceless works of art were stolen in broad daylight from the Rhoda Teagle Library. The works include The Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, Starry Night, by Vincent van Gogh, Girl With A Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer, and Beneath the Great Wave of Kanagawa by Hokusai.
Fortunately, our 8th graders have launched an intense, multi-agency investigation into this brazen heist. They have been analyzing surveillance footage, collecting fingerprints and physical evidence, interviewing persons of interest, and drawing lessons on how to proceed from history, using Nicholas Day's book The Mona Lisa Vanishes, which we coincidentally happened to be reading in English class.
At this time, the students' investigation is active and ongoing. They have narrowed down the list of suspects to 8 individuals in our school community, and I am happy to say that all eight of those individuals are cooperating fully with the investigation, submitting to interviews and fingerprinting.
Over the next couple of weeks, teams of investigators will be reviewing their evidence -- physical, testimonial, and documentary -- and building a case to bring the perpetrator to justice. In the meantime, if you have any information that might aid their investigation, please reach out to any 8th grader. Also, if you see any of these hardworking detectives in the community, please buy them a donut. They need all the help they can get!
When does the holiday season begin?
Señora Leibly's Spanish II class is holding a debate to resolve one of the defining questions of our time: does the Christmas season begin before or after Thanksgiving? Working in like-minded groups, students wrote a statement declaring their position on the topic as well as five supporting arguments. In an effort to anticipate what the opposing group might argue they developed five counterarguments and then a statement indicating why each of these is incorrect. The students are doing this completely in Spanish, a big lift at this level of language learning. The spoken portion of the debate will take place in Spanish, too, making this planning all the more important.