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Summer Term Prep is Complete!

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If anyone is excited about the upcoming start of Summer Term, it’s Fritter. He has been lonely these past few weeks with the absence of students on campus, and is especially excited to see so many new faces and to practice begging for his typical six meals a day. He has remained camped out on the deck, alternating between keeping an eye out for arriving students and napping in his chair.

However, Fritter is not the only one looking forward to the student’s arrival. The Summer Term team has been prepping for the past week, with new mentors running around campus discovering our sustainable systems and then venturing out to explore the island of Eleuthera. We are all ready and excited to kick off the Summer Term once all of the students are on campus. All that is left to do is wait!

Cape Eleuthera Institute, CEI

UNC-Chapel Hill Morehead Cain-Scholar Interning at CEI

We are thrilled to have UNC-Chapel Hill Morehead-Cain scholar Stephan Grabner with us this summer!  Stephan joins us as the CEI Systems Intern on his third summer of the four-summer Morehead-Cain summer enrichment program. Though Stephan is a philosophy major at UNC, he will be helping Marco with biodiesel production this summer at CEI.

How does a philosophy major end up hands-on with biodiesel? For Stephan it is part of an interdisciplinary approach he is taking to find connections between sustainable development, ethics, and economics.

Stephan’s journey to Eleuthera has been a long one. Originally hailing from Vienna, Austria Stephan went on to high school at the United World College of the American West in Montezuma, in New Mexico—a small international boarding school with students from roughly 100 countries. UWC nominated Stephan for the Morehead-Cain, which had only just been opened up to international candidates.

Congratulations and Welcome Stephan!

Alumni, Cape Eleuthera Institute, CEI

CEI Welcomes its Summer Interns, Including Six IS Alumni

This week, 16 summer interns arrived on Eleuthera to work at Cape Eleuthera Institute. Of those 16, we were excited to welcome back 6 Island School alumni who spent a semester, summer term, or divemaster course here on the Cape over the last 6 years. Mackey Violich (F’06), Elizabeth Douglas (S’08), Jasmine Wilchcombe (F’08), Grace Dennis (Su’10), Chris Daniell (F’10) and Jake Verter (S’09) will be here supporting the Shark and Aquaponics programs for the next two months! We’re glad to have you back!
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Orvis’s Perk Perkins Visits The Island School and CEI

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This week, the CEO of Orvis, Perk Perkins, cruised through Cape Eleuthera. Perk is on a sabbatical from Orvis and is spending his time sailing throughout the Caribbean. He stopped by The Island School and Cape Eleuthera Institute to check out the work we are doing down here. He is most interested in CEI’s research on bonefish and the study of their flats habitat. We hope to stay in touch with Perk in the future so that he may help guide us as CEI becomes a hub for flats research in The Bahamas. The next stop on his tour of the Caribbean is the Exumas and CEI’s Aaron Shultz was lucky enough to accompany him on this leg of the trip. We hope Perk comes back to visit us again soon!

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Congratulations Corey and Odette!

After a long day and night, we are excited to announce the birth of “Bean” Broderick who was born on the evening of June 12, 9.5 pounds and 23 inches long. Though exhausted, both Odette and the new baby are recovering well. Congratulations to the proud parents, Corey and Odette. We can’t wait to meet the little guy–and find out his real name!

Alumni, Events

Save the Date: Monster Run-Swim at The Island School September 22!

During the weekend of September 21-23, 2012, The Island School will be hosting its very first Monster Run-Swim. The course has been extended to encompass a more expansive network of land and sea features along the perimeter of Cape Eleuthera. Alumni, families, and friends of The Island School from close and far, please join us on-island to meet the challenge of a new course, designed to be longer, harder, and more intense than ever: more running, more swimming.

For more information about the weekend, the schedule, and course maps, please visit the Monster Run-Swim website (registration and RSVP forms to come soon!). If you have any other questions, please contact Cam Powel at cameronpowel@islandschool.org.

We hope to see you all there!

Alumni

Tegan Maxey Aboard Ocean Classroom’s Harvey Gamage Stops at Island School This Spring

by Tegan Maxey

I spent the past four months sailing the schooner Harvey Gamage through the Caribbean and up the east coast of the US, and I finally understood how lucky I am to have a home like Eleuthera. I started to get an understanding of how lucky I am when the trip was just starting, talking my shipmates, Brendan, who is a Island School alum of the Fall 2011 semester, and my bunk mate Patricia, who applied to Island School and attends the New York Harbor School, one of The Island School’s partner schools. It wasn’t until we were leaving the Caribbean, very slowly because there was no wind, that I really got an understanding of how awesome my home really is. We were at the southern end of Cat Island with absolutely no wind, when Brendan and I decided that we were going to convince the captain to take us to Eleuthera. I wasn’t very hopeful, but the next day at lunch, I found myself aloft, looking out at Lighthouse beach as we approached Eleuthera. By 4 pm I was giving my dad a hug, introducing him to my ship mates, and making a plan to go to The Island School for dinner. Showing all of my friends from the boat around Island School was amazing, very strange, but still amazing. It really sunk in that my home was really cool when every single person on board made a point to come and tell me how amazing they thought The Island School was. Of all the things we did on the trip, Carnival in Dominica, sailing sloops in Carriacou, hiking to the boiling lake, for me the most amazing part was sharing my home with my shipmates.

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Alumni

Update from Bradley Watson and Garneisha Pinder in China: Genetic Engineering

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Many of us “Greenies” have heard of Monsanto and their Genetically Modified crops that can withstand their herbicides and John Deer’s seed dispersal machinery and some of us cringe at the thought of Genetic Modification or Engineering. I did too until I spoke with a gentleman from Tanzania who shared some of the ways he would use Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). He began by talking about soy bean plants which happen to be a popular crop in Africa as well as elsewhere. The soy bean belongs to the legume family, a group of plants that are capable of taking nitrogen from the atmosphere and “fixing” it in the soil with the help of fungi that lives in their roots while most other plants rely on fertilizers and other nitrogen sources to keep them green and healthy. So a soy bean field is very fertile. This fertility encourages weed growth and many soy bean varieties are engineered to withstand high doses of pesticides to combat these weeds that compete with them for light, nutrients and water in agricultural systems. Now I don’t like the idea of using any more pesticides than are absolutely necessary because I don’t want to eat them nor do I want them on the water table etc.

Dr. Ma Sichun and I observing anerobic methanogenic bacteria under a microscope

Well my friend from Tanzania’s proposition is that we engineer soy bean plants to grow under lower light conditions or alter them in some other way Continue reading →

Cape Eleuthera Institute, CEI

High School Senior Projects at CEI

This spring, two high school seniors, Louise Shiverick (F’10) and Sam Falkson, came down to Eleuthera to work at the Cape Eleuthera Institute for their senior project. Read about their time at CEI working with the lemon shark program.

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Louise

My name is Louise Shiverick and I am lucky enough to be working at the Cape Eleuthera Institute with the Shark Research and Conservation Program for my Senior Project. At my school, Hathaway Brown (in Shaker Heights, Ohio), the last thing that the seniors do before graduating is a two week senior project. The point is to give us one last opportunity in high school to get involved with something that we find really interesting. People do a variety of things, from community service at soup kitchens to shadowing a doctor at one of the nearby hospitals. While most people stay at home, I decided to do something different and come to CEI.

I was an Island School student in Fall 2010 and was on the Lemon Shark research group Continue reading →

Cape Eleuthera Institute, CEI

CEI’s Booth at Conch Fest

Last week, the nearby settlement of Deep Creek had their annual homecoming called Conch Fest. The Cape Eleuthera Institute (CEI) set up a booth amongst all of the conch fritter and local craft stalls at Conch Fest to give information and answer questions about CEI and Island School, as well as play a few games with the children who stopped by the booth. Here are a few pictures of the booth at Conch Fest.

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