http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MysxE7j0ix0
On Halloween morning, the K4 group departed the Cape for their eight-day voyage. K4 group paddled through the current cut into the Cape Eleuthera Marina and then onto open seas, where they will make their way around the southern part of the island. This is the last of the groups to make the trip and they are expected to return next Monday.
Bon Voyage!
It’s my favorite time of year again; pumpkins, fall foliage, warm sweaters and…..CONCHtribution! Today is the first day of the 2010 Alumni CONCHtribution Campaign, an annual giving campaign for Island School alumni to show their support by donating to the Cape Eleuthera Foundation’s annual fund. Last year we raised over $17,000 with over 30% participation in the two months of the campaign, and we’ve set our goals even higher this year.
There are plenty of reasons to CONCHtribute in 2010. As always, the alumni classes are competing for the highest participation rate, with the winning class getting a plaque placed on the Golden Conch, which hangs prominently in The Island School dining hall. Secondly, this year the first $5,000 of the campaign will go toward supporting the journey of one Deep Creek Middle School student during the 2010-2011 school year. And finally, donors from any class whose participation rate surpasses 60% will receive a FREE Island School alumni t-shirt, featuring the logo to the right.
Need I say more? Clearly now is the best time to go to the CONCHtribution page and donate! Thank you for your continued support of the Cape Eleuthera Foundation!
At the Island School we have a saying: “there’s no such thing as trash, just resources in the wrong place.” This mantra is the guiding force behind our efforts to turn glass bottles into drinking vessels, vegetable oil into biodiesel, and old tires into a walking bridge. It is the reason why we compost; the reason why we take banana peels and pig manure and shredded cardboard and turn this “trash” into productive soil for our farm. The drive towards a more sustainable campus means following the model of a natural ecosystem, in other words, a system that generates no waste. Materials that might otherwise go into a landfill retain their productive capacity. But what about the school’s less tangible byproducts? In an intensely inward-looking and self-reliant community such as ours, social tension is bound to arise. How can disagreements, frustrations, and conflict be among the “resources in the wrong place?”
The answer starts at Community Meeting, a weekly forum where Island School students and faculty come together for collective problem-solving, goal setting, and appreciations. It was at a recent meeting—during a discussion of hot issues like dish crew, sorting recyclables, and what happened to all the socks Continue reading
“Boo!”
By Caciques Perry Leavitt and Liam Donovan
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Although it is not quite Halloween, The Island School celebrated the amazing holiday today. Tonight was our haunted house. We decorated the campus so that we could scare all of the Deep Creek Middle School students. The boathouse was haunted by four dead scuba divers. Liam was lying face down in the freshwater dunk tank ready scare all of the children. The dinning hall deck was a Continue reading
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Island School students brought the fears and thrills of Halloween to Deep Creek Middle School students. IS students creeped out their campus for this annual scare-athon. With zombies on the loose, hiding behind palm trees and jumping out from cisterns, a fun time was had by all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKox1IR419s
Halfway through the eight day kayak trip and down island trip rotation, the K3 kayak group departed this morning from Cow Point, Eleuthera. They will be spending four days on the water before embarking on a two-day solo experience. The K1 group finished their trip on Monday and headed down island this morning along with the K4 group. Kayakers in the K2 group were resupplied on Monday and will return to The Island School on Thursday evening.
The deep water shark team is excited to announce that the first of 3 satellite tags has popped off a Bluntnose sixgill shark! The shark was tagged with an X-tag supplied by Lucy Howie-Jordan of Microwave Telemetry Inc. on September 13th 2010 and set to record the shark’s movements for 30 days. The tag popped off, as programmed, on October 14th 2010. Once reaching the surface the tag began to slowly transmit the stored location, depth and temperature data and we are anticipating full recovery of the data. It’s exciting to see that the shark was tagged just off Cape Eleuthera and popped off at the Southern tip of Eleuthera just offshore from Lighthouse beach! On the image below you can see the track that the floating satellite tag took via surface currents. We hope it continues to Continue reading
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1_tCniERk4
Originally from Newfoundland, Canada, Odette (or Ms. Pretty, as DCMS students call her) is thrilled to now call Eleuthera home. Ms. Pretty completed her Bachelors of Arts at Concordia University where she studied Applied Human Sciences, a multi-disciplinary educational experience where psychology, sociology, and anthropology are integrated in applied situations. In 2009, she completed her Bachelors of Education, with a specialization in Global Perspectives Education. While completing her studies, Ms. Pretty worked in the fields of community health promotion and youth leadership development in a number of different communities: from Montreal to Alaska, France to Belize and Togo to Hawaii. This work helped to feed some of her greatest passions: travel, social justice learning, and working with young adults.
At Middlebury’s TEDx conference a few weeks ago, we had the good fortune of meeting Anna Cummins from 5 Gyres, an organization whose vision is to rid the oceans of plastic waste. Anna mentioned to us that 5 Gyres was working to organize a Youth Summit in Long Beach California, and she hopes that some of our high school-age alumni are interested in getting involved.
The Summit, to be held March 11-13, 2011 in Long Beach, California, is sponsored in part by grants from Disney Friends for Change Project Green and the Boeing Company Charitable Trust. The Summit is a comprehensive educational project designed to engage, mentor, and activate youth leaders across the United States and abroad in developing and launching action-oriented Continue reading
This week has been an eventful week for the Deep Water Sharks team. We said goodbye to three members of our team while they went off on their kayak trip. However we still have been working hard, out surveying two times this week, one of which was late Friday night. We stayed up as late as we ever have this semester and, as teenagers who are busy and need our sleep, there were some yawns.
Even so we had an awesome time. Aly went to set the survey with Annabelle and Sean, then Sean and Aubrey joined to retrieve the survey at 11pm. Though we have only caught two sharks this week, they are two types of sharks that we are looking for to conduct further research.
We are focusing on the Gulper and the Taiwan Gulper. Friday afternoon we caught a Gulper, but unfortunately we were not able to put a satellite tag on it to track its movements. Friday night, however, we caught the Taiwan Gulper, which is the larger of the two sharks and this one was 152 centimeters long. We took blood, a DNA sample, and placed a satellite tag on the shark.
The tag will track the shark for 30 days then pop off and transmit all the data it has stored on the sharks movements to a satellite. Currently we are working on our final presentations/scientific papers. Individually we wrote our introductions, but now in our academic rotations for kayak, the three of us are working as a team on our methods section here on campus.
Clay, Aly and Aubrey
