School competition, honors and more.
Gurnee
Performance ad Tea: Warren Township High School Theatre will present Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” at 7 p.m. April 23-25, and at 2 p.m. April 25 at 34090 Almond Road. Tickets are $11, and $6 for students, children, and seniors. This event has reserved seating. Visit showtix4u.com to choose your seats to purchase and print out your tickets at home. Also, Warren Theatre will host a Tea with Belle and Friends from 1 to 2 p.m. in the O’Plaine Cafeteria. Children can meet Belle and her friends before the Saturday matinee. There will be cookies, drinks, photo opportunities, and story time. Cost is $5 for children and they must be accompanied by an adult. Details, (847) 548-6855 or visit http://www.wths.net.
Competition: Seven Woodland Intermediate students have been named finalists in the MathCON competition hosted by the University of Illinois in Chicago. Sixteen of Woodland’s fifth-grade Advanced Math students chose to take part in the math competition in February via an online test that consisted of answering 40 questions in 40 minutes. Almost 45,000 students from more than 330 schools in 42 states competed. The top 700 students were chosen to advance to the final round of MathCON competition on April 25. Seven Woodland students placed in the top 700, and three more were chosen as alternates. All 10 students were in the top 5 percent of those who competed, with seven finalists placing in the top 2 percent. Finalists include Garrett Hill, Niharika Sapra, Ramanan Srirajan, Evan McGowan, Daniel Cho, Evelyn Whit and Yu Jin Lee and alternates David Zhang, Vaibhav Joshi, and Faaz Arif.
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Libertyville
Competition: Highland Middle School’s eighth-grade Blue Team received Highest Honors and placed fourth in the county, and Chris Fischer earned a perfect score of 20 during a recent competition with WordMasters Challenge. More than 150,000 students compete annually in the WordMasters Challenge, a national vocabulary competition. The team scored an impressive 182 points out of a possible 200 in the second of three meets this year, placing fourth in the nation. While Fischer earned a perfect score of 20 on the challenge, nationally, only 15 eighth-graders achieved this result. In addition, Jake Duffy was one of only three 8th grade students nationwide to score 20 points in the very difficult Gold Division. Other students who achieved outstanding results in the meet include 7th-grader Drew Hopkins and 8th-graders Annie Ryan and Annalisa Waddick. The WordMasters Challenge is an exercise in critical thinking that first encourages students to become familiar with a set of interesting new words (considerably harder than grade level), and then challenges them to use those words to complete analogies expressing various kinds of logical relationships.
Award: Highland Middle School is being designated an Illinois Horizon Schools to Watch for 2015, the highest and most prestigious honor given by the Association of Illinois Middle-Grade Schools (AIMS). The school is one of only two schools in the state to receive the award for the first time this year, while four other schools were re-designated for the second time in 2015. The award will be presented to the school during a special visit from AIMS representatives this spring. Highland School also will be recognized and showcased at the annual AIMS Summer Splash event this summer in Tinley Park, and at the National Schools to Watch Conference in Washington, D.C., in June. During the national ceremony, Highland officials will be honored at a gala dinner and are invited to meet with local representatives of Congress at Capitol Hill to discuss current topics in education pertaining to middle school and to share some of the exciting things happening in the Libertyville school. The school applied for the recognition and completed a lengthy application.
Honors: The Illinois Principals Association, as part of the National Association of Elementary School Principals, will honor Highland Middle School Principal Jon Hallmark as this year’s Jr. High/Middle School Principal of the Year of the Lake Region and Assistant Principal Lorenzo Cervantes as Assistant Principal of the Year of the Lake Region. They will be honored at an awards breakfast next month. It makes the first time Hallmark and Cervantes have been named Principal of the Year and Assistant Principal of the Year, with an award where members vote on candidates who are nominated by their peers. Hallmark has been a member of the IPA since he became an administrator 11 years ago. Cervantes is a four-year member of the IPA. According to the award, the Horace Mann/IPA Jr. High/Middle School Principal of the Year Award program annually recognizes outstanding middle school leaders who have succeeded in providing high quality learning opportunities for students. The principals have made exemplary contributions to the profession and are acknowledged by their peers. The program honors middle-school principals who have demonstrated that they excel in areas addressed by the selection criteria.
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