School News

Riverhead Central School District

To better serve their school’s bilingual student body, members of Riverhead High School’s student newspaper, The Riptide, are working to offer their online publication in Spanish as well as in English.

With that goal, the students created a Spanish version of the Wix website they launched in November, which they plan to populate with Spanish translations of their articles.

“They are working to translate all of the articles themselves,” said advisor Samantha Mallahy.

On average, The Riptide maintains a staff of 10 students, who contribute articles on a variety of topics. Freelancers, including student-athletes, who cannot attend weekly meetings, provide sports content and photos.

To read The Riptide online, visit www.rhsriptide.com.

In other school news, eight Riverhead High School students participated in an empowering and motivational Girls Power Tech Day at Miller Place High School on May 3.

During the inaugural event, sponsored by Eastern Suffolk BOCES’s Suffolk Regional Information Center, Cisco Systems, and Million Women Mentors, the students were inspired to pursue careers in information and communications technology through hands-on activities and engagement with industry professionals.

Students heard from several presenters, who spoke about the various obstacles they had overcome. Among them were Dr. Heather Findletar Hines, an assistant clinical professor, Anne Nubile, a network and systems technician, and Aura Gomez-Tagle, an engineering management major at Stony Brook University.

Via live broadcast, participants also communicated with students from across the country as well as USA Paralympian Katie Holloway, who shared a message about overcoming adversity and the road to resiliency.

The workshop culminated with a circuit building competition in which students worked in groups to construct an electrical device.

Tuckahoe School District
Tuckahoe middle school students, along with their teachers, had a delicious and healthy treat on April 19. Experts from Cornell Cooperative Extension and Stony Brook Medicine, as well as The East End Farm to School Project, created two delicious snacks for Tuckahoe’s middle school students.

Locally grown baby spinach, prepared with tangerines and a lemon dressing, was a new vegetable to many of our students. They also tried baked pita chips with a pesto dip, which was a huge hit. Staff and students alike hope to see it on the school lunch menu.

Westhampton Beach School District

Westhampton Beach High School science teacher Dianna Gobler and two freshmen, Jack Halloran and Morgan Pilo, have been selected to participate in the summer “Imaging with a New Light” training at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The program will vastly expand science research opportunities for high school science students.

As part of the workshop, to be held June 25 to 29, Gobler and her students will take part in lectures and hands-on training related to sample preparation, data collection, data analysis, x-ray microspectroscopy, and microdiffraction.

With the training, the students will be able to submit a proposal to BNL to use the National Synchrotron Light Source-II with BNL scientists to further study dinosaur bones that they collected during a 2017 middle school science trip to Wyoming. During that trip, the students worked alongside scientists and researchers to dig in microsites and identify new Triceratops dig sites, tagged and found dinosaur vertebrae and skulls, and discovered a rare bird tooth.

Both students were selected for the BNL training because of their interest in science research, Gobler said.

“This is an amazing opportunity for our students. The technology will be useful for many other types of student research projects going forward, from environmental to human health,” she added.