Bryan students will travel to Boise
Thanks to massive group effort, Bryan Elementary fourth-graders will visit Boise this week – many for the first time – to learn about state history and government.
The trip is the brainchild of Michelle Faucher-Sharples, who during her 10 years as a teacher always asks students to name the capital of Idaho.
“Most of the responses have been Seattle or Spokane,” she said. “We really need to get these kids to Boise,” she remembers thinking, because kids learn best by experience.
The school started fund-raising by recycling cell phones and ink cartridges. More than 400 of those later, the teachers realized they needed to seek other financial options.
So they applied for and received a grant from the Idaho Governor’s Commission on Lewis and Clark, which will pay for the charter bus.
They held a raffle, with items and tickets donated by Sunrise Rotary, plane tickets donated by Southwest airlines, and other goodies donated by local businesses. Students sold more than $4,000 in raffle tickets, which will pay for things like admission fees and food.
Students will sleep – boys and girls segregated – on the floor of one of Boise High School’s gyms and eat breakfast with the high school students in the morning.
Faucher-Sharples even received donations from her parents and her grandmother, a former schoolteacher, shortly before she died.
In their three days in Boise, the students will tour the capitol, attend a Senate Education Committee meeting, see a potato farm, visit museums and, hopefully, dine with members of the local Basque community. (Boise has the largest concentration of Basques outside of their region, which spans Spain and France.)
On the drive over, they’ll also visit the Nez Perce museum. On the drive back, they’ll visit Hells Canyon.
In the weeks before the trip, Faucher-Sharples said, students were so excited they were counting down the days.
Students make goal; teacher dyes hair red
In an attempt to motivate her students, physical education teacher Teri Hamilton promised to dye her hair bright red if they raised $3,000 for the American Heart Association.
On a recent afternoon, Skyway Elementary students cheered, clapped and squealed when they saw their teacher, freshly returned from the hairdresser.
The shade wasn’t as bright as Hamilton hoped – it’s a combination of roxy red and blazing red – but the change from her usually dark brown hair signaled that the students met their goal.
In the month of February, students raised $3,544.82 – double the money they raised last year – as part of the heart association’s Jump Rope for Heart fund-raiser.
Hamilton thanked the children for helping save lives, being active and showing compassion.
Entries sought for writers’ competition
Wordsmiths age 6 and up are invited to enter the Coeur d’Alene Library Writers’ Competition.
Julie Meier, the former library director, started the competition in 1988 as a way to discover and recognize talented writers in the community, and to challenge youths and adults to hone their skills.
Prizes will be awarded for each age bracket: $100 for first place; $50 for second place; $25 for third place.
Entries should be unpublished fiction or nonfiction prose, of 2,000 words or less. The deadline is March 31.
Entry forms are available online or at the library. The fee is $1 for 6- to 11-year-olds. For everyone else, it’s $2.
For more details and competition rules, call the library at 769-2315 or visit www.cdalibrary.org.
Learn about the Idaho Virtual Academy
Ever consider sending your child to an online school?
Learn more about the Idaho Virtual Academy, a public charter school that has 1,800 students across the state, at an information session on March 21.
Academy representatives will provide a demonstration of the program, show examples of curriculum, books and materials, talk about enrollment, and answer questions from the audience.
The event will be held at the Hayden Holiday in Express, 151 West Orchard, at two sessions: noon to 1 p.m. and 7 to 8 p.m.
For more information, visit www.IdahoVA.org.