For our students who aspire to travel into outer space!
For all our STEAM-loving students, take a look inside @SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Endeavour currently on its way to the @Space_Station and imagine yourselves one day maybe venturing into outer space!
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We celebrate Earth Day today and prepare for Global Youth Service Day this weekend!
Today, as we celebrate Earth Day and prepare for this weekend’s Global Youth Service Day, we recognize the remarkable leadership of young people across the country who are giving their time, energy, and expertise to work toward a better planet.
Here is the White House proclamation on Earth Day.
EARTHDAY.ORG’s mission is to diversify, educate and activate the environmental movement worldwide. Growing out of the first Earth Day in 1970, EARTHDAY.ORG is the world’s largest recruiter to the environmental movement, working with more than 75,000 partners in over 192 countries to drive positive action for our planet.
Global Youth Service Day is the largest youth service and civic action event in the world and the only one that celebrates all youth ages 5-25. On April 23-25, the call is for everyone to engage all young people and adult champions to serve, advocate, join, celebrate, or build capacity.
Three days of live streaming right here on Youtube.
Vaccinations at the Carver Community Center on Wednesday until 5PM. No lines! The second shot is May 19th
Register your child for kindergarten today!
Our profound THANKS to everyone who makes our after-school programs so successful!
COVID Update: A sort of miracle is materializing in the distance.
A sort of miracle is materializing in the distance. The pandemic siege appears to be lifting, and this time a full return to schools across the nation, while perhaps months away, is almost certainly not a mirage.
Published reports from the Centers for Disease Control suggest that the vaccines are doing their slow, steady work. Gov. Ned Lamont announced today that all public health restrictions due to the pandemic will be lifted on May 19, if improvements in vaccination rates continue.
The mask mandate will remain in place until further notice, but Lamont said at the Monday news briefing that at some point it will be up to individuals and institutions to determine if wearing masks is required.
Connecticut has been hovering for weeks at about 1,000 positive tests for COVID-19 a day. The state reached the milestone of 8,000 deaths from COVID-19 over the weekend. At the same time, the number of state residents who have been vaccinated against COVID-19 increases by about 10% each week, said the state’s chief operating officer, Josh Geballe. As of Monday, 61% of adults over the age of 18 had received at least one shot, Lamont said. At the current trajectory, we’ll be at 70% by the end of the month.
The mask mandate will likely continue in the state’s elementary, middle, and high schools through the end of the school year in June, and in crowded public places, Lamont said. But students returning to state-run colleges and universities this fall probably will not face a vaccination requirement, he said.
After COVID, we need to assess students’ abilities in a way that motivates them to be lifetime achievers.
The pandemic was a hardship, a tragedy, and may prove to be an opportunity. Our young people have lost so much—family members, connections to friends and teachers, emotional well-being, and for many, financial stability at home. And of course, they’ve lost some of their academic progress.
Maybe it’s time to consider that the emerging science of learning and our national reckoning this past year with unfairness and inequity are pointing in the same direction. Perhaps the size of the moment requires a commensurate response. We have a better sense of the tools we need to do the job, and a clearer sense of the size and nature of the problems.
It’s perfectly sensible to worry about the obvious academic setbacks during the pandemic. Ever since the first stay-at-home orders were issued, some students have been pressed into caretaking duties or forced to get jobs. The crisis first exposed, and then cruelly amplified, the inequities bound up in issues of poverty, race, disability, and isolation. Months into the pandemic, attendance and attentiveness remained a severe challenge. There’s a broad and growing consensus that online learning, in both its hybrid and purely remote forms, has been an anemic substitute for in-person instruction.
But our need to measure academic progress and loss (and Carver takes proficiency and growth measurement to the highest levels) is not as vital as the reckoning of the social, emotional, and psychological toll of the last 12 months.
We do not see Carver kids as having to come in and get tested and triaged and sent to different areas to get fixed. Our children are resilient, not broken. As long as our students feel like their job is to come to school to be fixed, their hearts won’t be in their own work. We need to avoid anchoring kids to the self-fulfilling prophecy of lower expectations. Carver connects kids to their passions and makes learning fun and hopeful.
Over a half-million Americans have died. Some kids will see their friends or favorite teachers in person for the first time in over a year. Others will be overwhelmed by the sheer joy of recess, band practice, sporting events, and the myriad academic and social passions they’ve missed. Teachers, too are desperate to see their kids, to connect, teach, elevate and love.
The consequences of getting our priorities wrong and putting the content before the child are serious and long-term. If a kid was sick at home and missed three months of math content, but got her confidence back, it wouldn’t be a big issue in her life. But if her confidence as a mathematician is destroyed because of labels that were put on her, it’s a lifelong issue for her. She’ll never be confident in math again. The pandemic happened, but our kids are just as capable and resilient as before.
Whatever we do when we return will be historic by definition. But if all we come up with is passing out diagnostic tests to quantify learning loss and then track kids into groups for remediation, it will be a terrible failure of imagination.
Trailing down the backside of a steep mountain at long last, and picking up speed as we head into a promising new year, we will use the data wisely, not to judge and rank students. We will guide our response to individual student needs—and spend our time and resources on creating an asset-based culture where everyone belongs.
As always, Carver will be focusing on the social and emotional needs of the child first—on their sense of safety, self-worth, and academic confidence.
It’s not that learning loss isn’t real, or that social and emotional initiatives alone will solve it. We face a hard reality now. Many children lost a great deal of academic growth last year. We need to know which students need extra support, including tutoring. But we also need to assess students’ abilities in a way that motivates them to grow.
To motivate students we have to address learning gaps—they need to learn math facts and build literacy skills—but do so in service to challenging work that shows them that schools, like the athletic field or their after-school lives, are a domain where they can contribute something great and achieve whatever dreams for the future that they embrace.
Carver has always depended on the generous support of its valiant volunteers!
Carver alumnus and basketball legend Jahmerikah Green-Younger goes professional!
Jahmerikah was a star basketball player for Brien McMahon High School. He and his family are longtime members of the Carver community.
We last wrote about Jahmerikah here when he was a senior guard for the Albertus Magnus College men's basketball team when he tallied his 1,000th-career point.
Today’s news is about this former Fearless Falcon signing a professional contract with the Western Massachusetts Zombies in the East Coast Basketball League.
Green-Younger played an integral part in the Falcons' line-up over his four-year tenure with the squad and became the 16th player in program history to join the 1,000th-point club his senior year. He had a breakout season during his second year on campus, averaging a team-leading 15.0 points per game behind seven 20-point performances to earn Third Team All-Conference honors in 2017-18. In that same year, Green-Younger was also named to the Great Northeast Athletic Conference (GNAC) All-Tournament Team.
Green-Younger earned First Team All-Conference honors after closing out his senior campaign with a team-leading 15.4 points-per-game average. He posted 17 double-digit efforts on the year, including a career-high 34 points against Emmanuel. The senior guard knocked down 49.6% of shots from the field, in addition to ranking third on the team in assists per game (1.7).
Currently with the Zombies, Green-Younger has appeared in three games and averaging 14.7 points per game behind a field goal and a three-point percentage of 50%. He has also recorded six rebounds, one assist, and a steal.
