Summertime at USN is anything but quiet. By the time it’s over, more than 800 summer campers of all ages will have learned something here while having a great time. Outside groups have been using our facilities as well. Read more.
Top: High school students in cooking camp this week; needlepoint camp earlier this summer.
Vince introduces Bert Mathews, new president of the Board of Trustees, who is excited about the school year to come. Read more.
If you missed it when it came in the mail, you can read Vince’s summer letter.
Payne Renovation
The original library and study hall have been reconfigured, creating a large meeting room suitable for groups of up to 100 people, a workroom for the HS faculty, and a classroom which will be used for theatre classes.
When school starts, visitors will be able to find their way around campus with the aid of new signs, which for the first time obey logic. Read about the new system.
photo by Taylor Jones ’12
Two USN students will have their photographs published in a new national magazine, Positively Green. Taylor Jones and Tzipi March were eighth graders when they worked on the “Plastics Project” in Mary Agee’s photography class, documenting the effects of our use of plastic. Their work will appear in the article on the Pacific Garbage Patch. See a pdf (18.4 mb file) of their project .
This summer, over 150 teachers from as far away as Jerusalem and as close as our own USN faculty attended a one-week institute on the Responsive Classroom approach to teaching and learning, the first to be offered in this region. Read more.
All high school students are invited to the Leadership Retreat at Camp Widjiwagan Friday and Saturday, August 15 and 16. Students will discuss goals they hope to accomplish and issues they hope to address in the school year. “We encourage any high school student looking to get involved in the life of the school to attend,” says Mr. Karpinos. For more information, email Kalpana Vallabhaneni or Mr. Karpinos.
To learn more, visit www.usn.org/karpinos
Annual Review for Vince
If you haven’t already responded to Vince’s survey about the 2007-2008 year, please take a few minutes to do it now.
USN’s 2007-2008 Annual Fund reached a record setting total, with parent participation at 92%. Read more, and see participation percentages for each grade level.
July is the time to review your USN email subscriptions and “promote” yourself to the next grade level, division, or athletic and arts interests. Log in here to modify your USN email subscription account, or read more.
USN Shuttle Bus Resumes
The morning shuttle bus we tried out in May will resume when school starts, with two new pickup spots added to last spring’s if there are enough riders for them. Read more, or fill out the form.
Middle schoolers will have more to look at in the hallways this year. Flat panel monitors have been mounted in the first and second floor hallways of the Gordon Wing, intended to share time-sensitive announcements with students in a more efficient manner and to enrich students’ experience through a number of other uses. The monitors were proposed and originally priced by last year’s 7th and 8th grade Student Council.
USN has added two local basketball standouts to the high school coaching staff. Read more.
Remember to fill out the required forms for your child to participate in athletics.
Competing against high schools from across the nation, USN’s yearbook staff won first prize at Indiana University’s High School Journalism Institute for their Team Theme package. Morgan Pitt ’09 also won a $500 journalism scholarship to Indiana University. Attending in addition to Morgan were her co-editor Kelsey Tanner ’09, Nicole Aliabadi ’11, and Amelia Furbish ’11.
It’s not too soon to gather books to donate to the annual book sale, and if you want us to pick them up this summer, we will. Contact Debbie Ward at debbward@yahoo.com or read more.
High school English teacher Sarah Harrison at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where she studied a theater-based approach to teaching Shakespeare with educators from all over the country.
