More than 60 alumni and former staff members of the Orange County Training School, Lincoln High School and Northside School gathered on the Northside site yesterday to celebrate the return of the Orange County Training School cornerstone to Elementary #11.

Elementary #11 will open in August 2013 on the site of these former schools that served students in the African American community prior to school desegregation.  Alumni shared memories and artifacts of the schools, their teachers and their experiences. 

CHCCS collected contact information from yesterday's participants in order to include alumni from the schools in future events as the construction of Elementary #11 is completed.

View pictures from yesterday's gathering on flickr:

What makes reading fun? Well, listening to several of the town's most famous citizens read certainly inspired the students at Frank Porter Graham Elementary School in Chapel Hill.

For the school's 14th annual Read-a-thon, the student body has been challenged to read 680,000 minutes in just two weeks. To reward the students in their reading efforts, the PTA sponsored a Read-a-thon Night event on January 25.

Carrboro Mayor Mark Chilton was one of several celebrity guest readers at the event. He read two stories including the Crafty Chameleon to a packed house of students and parents in the school's music room.

"I really enjoy interacting with the students as I read," said Chilton, who said that he volunteered for this in memory of his grandmother, who was a school teacher and helped him overcome reading difficulties as a child.

FPG families flocked to the school to hear Mayor Chilton and other celebrity guest readers like Eric Montross, authors Irma Tejada and Kelly Alexander. The students also came to school in part to show off the school's media center, which had been transformed into a jungle scene in honor of this year's Read-a-thon theme, "Go Wild for Reading."

FPG staff members including Jessica Streck Ortolano, Shannon Harris, Karen Casey and Susan Julian as well as several volunteers, spent hours transforming the media center into "Jessica's Jungle," complete with "Harris' Hideaway Village," a jungle waterfall, tiki hut and tropical rain forest.

According to 3rd grader Jack Morgan, the media center transformation was "cool." He particularly liked the reading huts where students can get away from it all and curl up with a good book.

The evening also featured live animals from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, a jungle-themed art project in the art room and a bake sale.

Read-a-thon, however, is not all fun and games. Reading is a critical factor in student achievement, according to Assistant Principal Crystal Epps.

"For elementary aged students, there is nothing more important than encouraging students to be active and engaged readers. We love that the FPG PTA does the Read-a-thon each year because it really helps the students build up their reading stamina."

According to parent volunteer and Read-a-thon co-chair Paige Zinn, "Our goal with Read-a-thon is to get every child at FPG excited about reading - and the only way to do that is to have some fun with it. We created Read-a-thon Night as a reward for all the hard work these kids have been doing."

View pictures from the Read-a-thon on flickr:

http://www.flickr.com//photos/54628272@N07/sets/72157629042211039/show/

Thirty CHCCS students have been selected as members of the NC Eastern Regional Orchestra.

The students were selected during an audition in Wilmington on January 14 and will perform February 24-26 with two nationally known conductors at the North Carolina School of Science and Math in Durham.

One student from Carrboro High was selected:  Jonathan Dolan, violin.  Kay Johnson is his director.

Eight students from Chapel Hill High were selected.  They are:  Jenny Jin, viola; Kevin Chen, violin; Eliana Rivera, violin; Andre HoTong,violin; John Cook, viola; John O'Regan, viola; Adam Wang, clarinet; and Eric Huang, trumpet. Barbara Smith is their director.

Twenty-one students from East Chapel Hill High were selected.  They are:  Sandhya, Mahadevan, violin; Joshua Lai, violin; Ashley Mizuno, violin; James Allen, cello; Taisuke Yasuda, violin; Ethan Chu, violin; Carolyn Chang, violin; Vincent Lai, violin; Stevie Yan, violin; Apoorva Iyengar, viola; Hong Niu, viola; Jonah Krolik, cello; Stephen Hahn, cello; Zachary Ao, cello; Corentin Le Hir de Fallois, bass; Yusheng Zhang, flute; Anna Quercia-Thomas, clarinet; Tianyi Wang, clarinet; Luke Sears, bassoon; Blaise Whitesell, horn; and Atticus Reynolds, timpani.  Ryan Ellefsen is their director.

At its January 19 meeting, the CHCCS Board of Education approved a resolution to submit a letter to the NC State Board of Education in regard to the application for the proposed Howard and Lillian Lee Scholars Charter School.  At that meeting, the Board appointed a subcommittee to finalize the content of the letter that would be submitted on behalf of the Board.  The subcommittee has completed its work, and the letter was mailed yesterday.  The letter is attached.

Students in French classes at Culbreth Middle School produced a music video entitled "Elle me dit."  Their teacher is Madame Marya Tipton.  View their work on Youtube: