Welcome to the new year! We hope everyone had a wonderful holiday break. All of us here at Carlé are very excited to begin this new year.

Science teacher Angie Siegel has begun teaching a hazmat certification class for interested students here at Carlé.

The hazmat class will be learning how to deal with situations where hazardous material and/or chemicals might be involved.

This is a state certification course that Angie is teaching over the course of several days, for free!, including a free copy of the textbook. This is a great opportunity for students and it is especially good looking on a job resume.

For the on the field exercise, Angie and the students will suit up with Captain Will Sepeta of the fire department.

A very special welcome and thanks to substitute teacher Karl Giovacchini whom has stepped in to teach Angie Siegel’s science classes while she is busy teaching the hazmat course. Carl is an exceptional teacher and we all just wanted to thank him for being there for us when we need him.

Thank you once again to Dr. Barry Munitz for his involvement with this school on many levels. Not only has he personally donated money to us here at Carlé for the last many years in a row to fund our senior plaques but he has gotten involved in helping us go about raising the money for our very own Carlé High School van so we can do community service and take students on enrichment trips.

Dr. Munitz recently reached out to the Honorable Willie Brown, former mayor San Francisco, who has responded in the positive with the willingness to help us on our van project.

We look forward to working with these two and others as we go about raising the funds for this much needed vehicle. We greatly appreciate these people's generosity towards us, and want everyone to know that we here at Carlé do not forget about the people that are good to us.

We’ve officially started our new contest run by the designers of the media room. This time around we are having a mouse pad contest. Like always, students come in to design their very own unique mouse pad of their own personal design, while including the symbol or name of Carlé on the art work somewhere to show some support for our school.

Just a few days in and we’re seeing some incredibly great designs already from students Robert Kanoe, Tommy Valdez and Andrew Subjack with more coming each day.

This contest is starting out to be very creative and it’s very exciting to see the students really get into designing.

To end the new year’s very first chronicle, I’d like to leave everyone with a quote about our school from our very own Principal Dr. Burger, “The kids that are here are good students; Just a very great group of kids.”

We hope that all students reach their graduation and find their way to success.

Jesse Harrell is a student at Carlé Continuation High School in Lower Lake, Calif.