LOWER LAKE, Calif. – Welcome back to the Carlé Chronicle for the 2017-18 school year.

After a whole summer of hiatus we finally return with a new article each week.

With a new school year comes new things, and that includes teachers.

As you may or may not know Carlé’s English teacher Dan Maes retired last year making 2017 his last year of teaching.

With Maes’ retirement Lexi Fredericks stepped in as Carlé’s new English teacher. We will report more on Carlé’s new English teacher in the next article, where we will do an in-depth interview.

During the introduction to the school year called the thematic teachers held classes such as geography, sex ed and introduction to math.

This thematic lasted two and a half weeks (13 school days) and students had the opportunity of earning 1.1 credits in each class if you came everyday and earned credit in each one of your classes.

Students will be rewarded with an hour of a credit for filling out their organizational planners and another hour of credit for showing spirit and wearing their Carlé shirts on Fridays. It doesn’t seem like a ton of credit but it adds up over time.

Since there wasn’t enough time to put the 6th grade period’s from last year gold level students in the article we would like to give a shout out to Shaina Yaquinto, Teagan Tompioner, CeCe Brown, Juan Carlos Octaviano, and Jose Carrillo.

Also during the thematic since the Chronicle was on hiatus, students received student of the week awards.

The first student of the school year was Zoe Markowitz. She was nominated by teacher Angie Siegel, who said “She always gave very insightful responses and was always on task.”

The second week’s student of the week was Shaina Yaquinto, who was nominated by teacher Alan Siegel.

“Shaina is always on task and determined and when I nominated Shaina everyone came to the consensus that she deserved it,” he said. “She runs our morning bulletin and is the best aide I have ever had. She is a hard worker and a natural leader.”

The most recent student of the week is Estefania Cuevas who was awarded when all the teachers came to an agreement about Estefania saying “Estefania is very friendly and always makes her work her priority, and that is what Carlé is all about.”

Carlé would like to thank from the bottom of our hearts Gina Weese, classified substitute office assistant.

Ms. Weese has done a tremendous job with a great attitude. She is very friendly and is always ready to help us out.

I asked her if she enjoyed working at Carlé and she responded, “Yes, I love working here, everyone is important and unique and I enjoy all of the different kinds of people I’ve met working at Carlé,”

Thank you so much Gina. Our designers have tried to show Ms. Weese how much we appreciate her by making her a plaque, mug and keychain. We have one more special plaque to award her next week.

Ultimate Peace is a charitable Organization put together by Dave Barkan Ultimate Frisbee Hall of famer from the Boston Hostages and former opponent of our civics and history teacher Alan Siegel.

This organization brings together Israeli, Palestinian and other Muslim children centered around ultimate Frisbee with the idea that these kids get to know each other better and become friends.

We at Carlé love the idea of bringing people of the world together. In the spirit of love similar to how we started the year last year making key chains and plaques for all the police officer, first responders and firefighters who worked so hard on the devastating fire in our community we chose to make some special rewards for Ultimate Peace for doing so much for these young Middle Eastern kids.

Our lead designers made key chains with the Ultimate Peace logo on them and these will be given out in the Middle East. Our designers then created completely new Ultimate Peace logo designs which we emailed to Barkan who will take them over to the Middle East and have the kids in the program judge. The top two designers will win free t-shirts with their own artwork on them.

Alan Siegel, who was awarded the 2005 California State Teacher of the Year award, will be traveling to Los Angeles this week to be part of this year’s State Teacher of the Year selection committee.

Siegel was hand picked by current State Superintendent Tom Torlakson to be part of a committee that will review all 58 county teachers of the year and select the top candidates for classroom visits and State Department of Education interviews.

There is a lot going on at our little school including fun PE competitions run by teachers Lance Christenson and Lexi Fredericks as this article went to press.

We will detail this and a whole lot more in the next article.

Nicholas Phipps is a student at Carlé Continuation High School.