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| On May 25, nine student scholars at Friends Select were inducted into the Cum Laude Society, a national organization dedicated to recognizing "excellence in academic work." They joined four current student members who were inducted last spring, bringing the total to thirteen this academic year. The students were:
Class of 2010
Amy Elana Blum
Cameron Marie Anderson
Michelle Leigh Degutis
Amanda Isabel Mauri
Class of 2011
Taylor Raymond Dibble
Min-hee lee
Lucca Perse Pelliccia
Grace Anne Garbrecht
Anna-Claire Morris Siena
Class of 2010
Inducted Last Spring
Lorraine L. Beck
Claire Suzanne Good Cocroft
Sarafina Kietzman-Nicklin
Morgan Tess Williams
The Cum Laude Society was founded in 1906 at a private school in Maryland. It only was to be in "schools of superior academic quality" and only in boys schools at first. Now there are 338 chapters in the United States, most of which are in independent schools.
The Friends Select School chapter was established in 1962.
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| Senior Jake Gardner-Rosen placed second in the men's varsity race with a time of 6:16 at the Scholastic National Crew Championships in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., on May 28-29. "This is a great culminating achievement to Jake’s rowing career at Friends Select," said athletic director Tim Litz. Gardner-Rosen will launch his collegiate rowing career at Georgetown University next season.
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It was a season of firsts for the varsity softball team. Pre-season started with the team’s first trip to South Carolina, where playing against very talented teams helped the Falcons prepare for the season. The team started strong with three straight Friends Schools League wins. The girls stayed focused throughout the year and finished with six league wins, good for first place in our division. The Falcons qualified for the Friends Schools League playoffs and earned the #2 seed. The season finished with a total of 10 wins – the most in school history – a huge improvement from two wins in 2009, and three the year before.
Leadership on this team came from many sources. Michelle Degutis, Tessa Glover, Keara McLaughlin, and Camy Anderson demonstrated the senior leadership needed to get through the tough times. Tenth graders Grace Finkbiner and Cate MacQueen showed they are ready to take over for the departing seniors and continue to lead this program in the right direction, with the help of returning juniors Anna-Claire Siena and Drew Colman. With so many returning freshman and sophomores, the future seems bright for Falcons Softball!
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Eighth graders recently spent May 12-15 exploring some of the natural and historic wonders of New Mexico. For their teachers, the trip was experiential learning at its best, directly linked to course material. For the students, the trip was a chance to do what middle schoolers do best – hang out – with some pretty cool, educationally enriching activities thrown in for good measure. For everyone, the four days together offered a chance to build community by forging even closer connections among students and faculty.
The trip, specifically designed to expose students to the ancient cultures of the Americas, extended the eighth grade’s thematic study of ancient world civilizations. The itinerary would make any adult with wanderlust jealous, with visits to the Taos and Acoma pueblos, Bandolier National Monument and the Chaco Culture National History Park. In preparation for the trip, eighth graders studied the geology of the Southwest and the art of New Mexico painter Georgia O’Keefe. During the trip, they pondered a series of “essential questions” developed to help them make connections between their in-class curriculum and their experiences on the road.
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Second grade teacher and greyhound advocate Richard Stobaugh treated two second graders to a Saturday focused on all things greyhound-related. Minas and Anna, whose parents placed winning bids for the activity at the Parent Association Auction in March, started off at Tr. Richard's house in New Jersey, where they played with and walked his two greyhounds. After lunch at a local restaurant, they visited Greyhound Angel's Adoption in Pensauken, N.J., where they met the staff, walked several dogs and saw the piles of bedding donated by Friends Select families to pad the dogs' crates. Next up on the warm spring day was a stop for ice cream before the' parents picked them up. This was the second time that Tr. Richard has shared his commitment to rescuing and finding them suitable homes by hosting students for a day.
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| Friends Select School's business manager Michael Noonan signed a check for $818.21 and put it in the mail to The United Nations Children's Fund, (better known as UNICEF), the international organization that works for children's rights, development and protection. The money -- delivered to the business office in pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters -- was collected by lower school students during a robust Halloween "Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF" drive. To prepare and inspire their classmates, the third graders made presentations in each lower school classroom and delivered distinctive orange collection boxes for each student. The project, coordinated by third grade teacher Desiree Tee, was the third graders' community service project for 2010.
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| Friends Select students stepped out of the school and right into an interactive performance on the northeast corner of 17th & Benjamin Franklin Parkway at noon on Friday, May 7. Many of the students had downloaded the original soundtrack on their iPods in advance so they could follow along as Group Motion Dance Company visited five public sculptures between the school and city hall, exploring themes derived from the art: suspension, balance, vision, remembrance and connection.
The dancers hope their performance will heighten awareness of public sculptures in the heart of the city by such luminaries as Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, Jacob Lipkin, Nathan Rapoport and Robert Indiana. According to the pre-performance announcement: “Often overlooked or taken for granted, these significant works of art live silently but with a powerful presence in the urban landscape in the center of the city.” After actively participating as a traveling audience, the middle school students are likely to walk past these familiar pieces of public art with a whole new level of appreciation and understanding.
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| Friends Select School's annual fine arts festival and spring concert was held on Thursday, May 6, to great acclaim from audience members.
The festival kicked off with an all-student art show exhibit at the Select Gallery display areas. Two- and three-dimensional media were represented, including metalsmithing, stained glass, painting and drawing, and sculpture.
This year, fine arts department chair Martha Van Nuis introduced an interactive component to the viewer's experience: student artists invited two adult "art patrons" to not only view their work but to listen to the artist describe her or his vision for the piece and to give written feedback.
At 7 p.m., middle- and upper school choral, instrumental and percussion ensembles performed an eclectic mix of classical and contemporary music (everything from Bach to Led Zeppelin), to an enthusastic audience. Particularly well-received were the middle school percussion ensemble and orchestral performances of Clocks, by Coldplay, and Kashmir, by Led Zeppelin.
The upper school orchestra and percussion ensemble featured student-arranged and conducted performances of the jazz number Baccalo con Pan, by Chuck Valdez, arranged by Nate Harlan '11; and pop song Mr. Blue Sky, by Jeff Lynne, arranged by Amy Blum '10. These songs were intermixed with Sinfonia No. 1 (Bach) and Ten Day Interval (Tortoise), arranged by music teachers Heather Fortune and Dan Capecchi, respectively.
The middle and upper school choral groups, led by Veronika Zhmeniak, presented a delightful mix of international folk songs, sung in Italian, German and Spanish, as well as a student-arranged version of Time After Time by Cindy Lauper. The concert conlcuded with a rousing rendition of Bill Withers' Lean on Me.
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Senior Jake Gardner-Rosen (varsity) and junior Oliver Ingram (junior varsity) rowed right into first place in the Philadelphia City Championships on May 2 in their respective races. Maneuvering their shells single-handedly up the Schuylkill River course, both rowers crossed the finish line around nine seconds earlier than the second place finishers. They will participate in the national championships in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., over Memorial Day weekend. Gardner-Rosen will row for Georgetown University’s team next season, while Ingram will continue to lead the Friends Select crew team.
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| Friends Select School's 21st Annual Math-Science Symposium on April 21 featured everything from cupcakes (co-winning Rube Goldberg machine: "Cupcake Crazy") to catfish ("All Catfish Species Inventory," presented by Mark Sabaj Perez, Ph.D., collection manager of fishes, Academy of Natural Sciences). Throughout the evening, middle- and upper school students presented to small breakout groups of parents, teachers and peers on math and science topics as diverse as The Urban Water Cycle and History of Pi and Hyperbolic Geometry. The evening concluded with the ever-popular upper school physics class bridge competition.
Seventh grade students were asked to research and present on environmental science topics that they found relevant to their lives and to the city community. Eighth grade teams of physics students demonstrated Rube Goldberg Machines, complex, hand-built machines which performed simple tasks such as turning on an iPod ("Mister Blue Sky"), sharpening a pencil ("A Sharper Point") or crushing an aluminum can ("Saving the World One Crush at a Time"). Two teams shared first place bragging rights: "The Reason it's Called Snail Mail," by Kayla Kahan, Adam Fletcher and Sam Preine (stamping an envelope); and the aforementioned "Cupcake Crazy," by Jonathan Lai, Allison Quirk, and Alex White (planting a birthday candle into a cupcake).
Then it was on to the theatre. Dr. Perez, fresh off a visit to Brazil, described his work over the past few years overseeing "The All Catfish Species Inventory," a planetary biodiversity inventory of what arguably is the most recognized fish in the world.
Upper school students followed his talk with classroom presentations of their own. The evening culminated with the physics class bridge competition, where students constructed bridges and tested their weight-bearing properties by adding weights one at a time until the bridges broke apart.
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| Arch Street Friends Meeting welcomes the Friends Select Community to attend one or both of the final two remaining Quaker Quest evenings at Fourth and Arch Streets on Tuesday May 4 and May 11. Quaker Quest is offered as a series of informal presentations and discussions on different topics presented by Quakers of diverse backgrounds and experiences. Each speaker shares their stories of their own spiritual journeys and how Quakers put faith to action. The topic for May 4 is Friends and Activism/Peace, and May 11 ends the series with Friends and Family/Parenting.
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| The Friends Select School Board of Trustees’ Education Committee has established a school policy of NOT reporting SAT scores.
“Aggregrate SAT scores . . .represent not just academic achievement but also demographic and socioeconomic factors in a complex and unpredictable mix. There is extensive research that indicates that SAT scores correlate with family income and educational level. Because it is so difficult to determine what the scores are measuring, the Education Committee reaffirms the policy of Friends Select School that it will report college acceptances and other indicators of college-bound student achievement but will not release SAT score aggregates.”
Friends Select graduates over the past few years have been admitted to Harvard, Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, and other schools considered highly selective. FSS prides itself on its personalized education, its personalized college application process, and its record of achievement matching its graduates with their colleges and universities of first choice. The FSS college list reflects the many interests, talents and abilities of its diverse student body.
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| On the Wednesday and Thursday before spring break, just as spring fever is peaking, middle school faculty and students will break from their everyday routines and immerse themselves in intensive, two-day mini-courses which will explore everything from digital filmmaking to effective dog-training techniques.
"We started doing middle school mini-courses a few years ago," explains Terry Kessel, director of middle school. "It's a great opportunity for our students to explore a specialized topic in-depth. Our faculty love it, because they get to develop curriculum around a personal passion. It's playful and creative."
This year, students will choose among architecture, hiking and recording the sounds of the Wissahickon (and composing music based on material they gather), museum exploration, botanical drawing, Impressionist art, jewelry making, and the aforementioned filmmaking and dog training.
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| On Thursday, March 18, Friends Select School will host International Day, part of the International Studies Program at Friends Select. International Day is a day of special programming set aside each year to explore one international theme in depth. This year's theme: Design: How World Cultural Values Shape Design Aesthetics. The day will kick off with a talk by keynote speakers Hilary Jay and Beth Van Why of Design Philadelphia, followed by seminars and workshops around the city, each of which will explore a different aspect of design.
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Ten Friends Select School students competed in this year's Pennsylvania State Scholastic Chess Championships held on March 6 and 7 in Carlisle, Pa. In total, the team garnered close to 10 medals and trophies, and the K-3 Open team won Second Place in the State of Pennsylvania (the trophy can be seen in lower school director Michael Zimmerman's office).
Team members included Patrick Bell, 9th grade; 4th graders Jack G., Clara P., and Jacob T.; 2nd graders Yuva G., Torin K., Zak K., Manas N., and Jonah T.; and kindergartner Jasmine G.
Torin K. was named both 2nd grade champion in the State of Pennsylvania, and State of Pennsylvania co-champion in the K-3 Open division. According to chess coach Ross Colby, the competitor Torin tied is ranked 20th in the country in this division.
Congratulations to the team!
Award Winners
K-3 Open section
FSS K-3 Open team won second place in the State of Pennsylvania Jonah T., 2nd grade: won 3 out of 5 games and a top finisher medal
Yuva G., 2nd grade: won 3 out fo 5 games and a top finisher medal
Torin K., 2nd grade: won 4.5 out of 5 games and a trophy for 3rd place; was 2nd grade champion in the state of Pennsylvania; and tied for the K-3 Pennsylvania State Champion title
K-6 under 800 section
Jack G., 4th grade: won 4 out of 5 games and a trophy for 6th place
K-9 under 1000 section
Jacob T., 4th grade: won 4 out of 5 games and a top finisher medal
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|  Friends Select’s 32nd annual bloodmobile on Friday, March 6 was a resounding success. Donors contributed 65 pints, five pints more than last year and eight more than 2008.
The donors included 44 students, 21 faculty and staff, six parents and two former parents. Nine 16-year-olds donated this year – the second year when students that age have been permitted to donate, with parental consent.
The results are a tribute to the students (named below) who worked on the Bloodmobile. Even with the interruption of several snow days, they kept the momentum going to recruit donors. As in previous years, the Red Cross staff was full of kudos for the student volunteers, praising them for their enthusiasm and responsibility.
The Upper School Bloodmobile Committee included: Amanda Mauri, Heather Silver, Nina Iamurri, Ambuj Suri, Keara McLaughlin, Sarafina Kietzman-Nicklin, Cameron Anderson, Lauren Reddick, Stephanie Curtin, Elizabeth Centurion and Michelle Degutis.
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| Sarah Gleason, a junior at Friends Select School, has been named a runner-up for the 2010 Elizabeth Bishop Prize in Fiction for her short story, "Missing Eyebrows."
"Missing Eyebrows," started life as a class assignment in Wendy Buckingham's 10th grade English class last year. Students were asked to write a story using stream of consciousness after reading Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.
The Elizabeth Bishop Prizes in Verse, Fiction, and Playwriting, are administered
by the Walnut Hill School for the Arts in Natick, Mass. Named after Pulitzer Prize winning-poet Elizabeth Bishop, who attended the school from 1927 to 1930, they are awarded each year to celebrate the freshest, most accomplished examples of imaginative literary craft by young writers from around the world.
"Missing Eyebrows," will appear this spring in the school's literary magazine, The Blue Pencil Online.
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| Friends Select School's Mock Trial Team has advanced to the third round of the John S. Bradway Philadelphia High School Mock Trial Competition organized by Temple University Beasley School of Law and the Young Lawyers Division of the Philadelphia Bar Association. Winners of the next round, scheduled for Thursday, Feb. 25, at the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia, will advance to the quarterfinals of the City Competition, with the chance to represent Philadelphia at the state mock trial finals at Dickinson College, in Carlisle, Pa.
Friends Select's team won the first round on January 30, by defending its client against third degree murder charges and gaining acquittal. "The winning defense team was led by senior captain Melanie Young, with fantastic performances by freshmen Alex Aaron and Sam Gerson, sophomore Alina Drufovka, juniors Maddy Barton and Mahan Zahra, and senior Emerson Hawkins," said faculty advisor Brian Kors, upper school history teacher.
"That team's high score has propelled us to the third round this Thursday, but this time we will compete as the prosecution," said Kors.
The John S. Bradway High School Mock Trial Competition is offered each spring to public, private and parochial schools; approximately 30 schools compete each year.
Friends Select's team has nearly 20 students altogether, although only up to eight students are used for each side in all trials. In addition to the students named above, the team includes: Darien Headen, Ben Behrend, Michael Gomella, Nate Levin, Jonah Rosen, Ian DiMedio, Magnus Deppe, Peter McCurry and Henry Russell.
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| Weather-Related School Closings
It is the policy of the school to follow the lead of the Philadelphia School District in school closings due to inclement weather.
If Philadelphia Public Schools are:
Open, Friends Select is Open.
Closed, Friends Select is Closed.
Open without Transportation, Friends Select is Open without Transportation.
Closing Early because of Snow, Friends Select also will Close Early.
The Friends Select School number is 134.
The After School and Vacation Care programs do not operate on days school is closed. The After School and Vacation Care programs do operate on days school closes early.
Please listen to KYW Radio for school closing information.
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When Philadelphia was hit with more than 21 inches of snow last week, all the schools in the city shut down. But that didn't mean that teaching and learning at Friends Select shut down--on the contrary. When it became apparent last Tuesday there was a good chance school would be closed for the remainder of the week, faculty and students good-naturedly implemented "Plan B"--use the school's Online Learning Center as a means to conduct class, post class assignments and communicate with each other.
Students in teacher Dan Capecchi's 8th grade Latin class, for example, were asked to create snowmen in the form of their favorite emperor. Constantine, known as the first Christian Roman emperor (St. Constantine in the Eastern Orthodox Church) was Juliet K.'s choice (above).
Middle school teacher Martha Van Nuis conducted both 6th grade math class and 7th grade English class throughout the week.
On Wednesday, there were close to 1500 activity records captured on the Online Learning Center, for classes ranging from Western Civilization, to Biology, to Algebra 2.
Does this mean that the long-cherished notion of a snow day--a day perchance to dream, to put the everyday cares of the world aside, if only for a moment--is about to change?
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