St. Mary’s Students Learn Kindness, Compliments
Third-graders at St. Mary’s Catholic School spent two half-days this week in their own retreat.
Free from arithmetic and reading, the 30-odd students concentrated on kindness, compliments and “vulturing.”
Vulturing? At St. Mary’s, the term means putting others down, or just being mean.
“When are times I ‘vulture’ myself?” asked Laura Tucker, a parent volunteer who helped run the retreat. The examples flowed.
“Sometimes if you don’t get a super-good score on a paper and your parents still say it’s good and I say it’s not,” said Nick Ambrose.
“Sometimes your brother or sister might get more of something than you get and you might get a temper and you might kick a drawer,” hypothesized Sean Greany.
“And who would that hurt?” Tucker asked.
“The drawer,” Sean replied, deadpan.
The first half of the retreat combined talk about ways the kids could avoid hurting others and ways to keep their own morale up. It’s part of a program called Kids Care/Teens Care that St. Mary’s has used for several years. Each grade has its own retreat.
Kathy Willcox, St. Mary’s director of development, also helped with the third graders.
The second session of the retreat was on compliments.
“It was so wonderful to see their little faces light up when their classmates said something nice about them,” Willcox said.
Bears serving up ham
The 38th annual ham dinner sponsored by the Bear Booster Club of Central Valley High School will be held Tuesday. The event usually pulls in about 500 people.
“We have really good support from the community and the senior citizens,” said Madelyn Bafus, chairman of the ham dinner committee.
Money gathered at the dinner goes toward scholarships for Central Valley students. Last year, the group awarded four scholarships of $400 each.
The dinner runs from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. Cost is $5 for students and adults; $4 for seniors and children 12 and under; and free for children 5 and under.
A group of senior citizens from Good Samaritan Village attends the dinner each year. And Central Valley’s theater department provides entertainment, this year a costume parade for the play “Anne of Green Gables.”
Parent volunteers put on the dinner.
Speaking of the CV band…
Central Valley High School’s marching band won the people’s choice award, honors for best music and best percussion, and overal took second place in competition in Everett last weekend.
The group competed against 22 bands, with the toughest competition it had faced this year. Earlier this fall, the 146-student band won overall championships at the Tri-Cities, Spokane and Portland.
YWCA honor for EV student
East Valley High School junior Sarah Serbell will be honored as this year’s Outstanding Young Woman of Achievement at the annual YWCA Women’s Luncheon.
Serbell is a well-rounded student with a 3.7 gpa and strong community involvement, said Lynn Lauer, director of the school’s Student Oriented Community Service program.
Serbell is a member of the SOCS program, a volunteer at Valley Hospital and Medical Center, a volunteer for the hospital’s Festival of Safety and has won recognition from her employer, the Liberty Lake Albertson’s, for her work ethic.
, DataTimes MEMO: The Education Notebook is the spot The Valley Voice devotes to telling our community about students’ accomplishments, about learning in classrooms across the Valley. Teachers or parents whose students have earned honors, feel free to toot your horn. Contact Marny Lombard at the Valley Voice, 13208 E. Sprague, Spokane, WA 99216. Call: 927-2166. Fax: 927-2175. E-mail: MarnyL@spokesman.com