JUNE 2008 (VOL. 14, NO. 9) est. 1893 • K-12 college prep
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Capital Campaign Co-Chairs John and Christine Davis Ashok Krishnamurthi and Deepa Iyengar
Team Members Lon Allan Helen Amick Sabina Chitkara Karen Coates John Cox Wei-Jin Dai and Faustina Chen Barbara Drummer Grace Edvalson Doug and Linda Emer y Vanaja Gadiraju Melinda Gonzales Regina Gupta Simi Gupta Marcia Hirtenstein Dan Hudkins Manisha Jain Helena Jerney Vidya Kamat Yulia Korobko Arne Lang-Ree June Li Betsy Lindars Susan Mandell Sangeeta Mehrotra Dan Molin Brian Moss
Harker Celebrates 10 Years with “Parade of Accomplishments” On May 2, at the annual Head of School’s Circle Dinner, guests celebrated 10 years of the opening of the Bucknall campus and the establishment of the Harker Upper School with a parade of accomplishments. The parade highlighted how far we’ve come in such a short period of time. The major benefactors of the capital campaign were recognized, and a special acknowledgement was extended to the early donors who made gifts at a time when Harker did not have a track record for the Upper School. These families had faith that Harker would establish a school of the quality and caliber it has. The parade of accomplishments showed the early donors as well as the current donors the return on their investment in our students and teachers. Students from the National Honor Society, and lower, middle and upper school student councils were honored and carried the numerous banners naming some of the most noteworthy accomplishments that our students have achieved in the past 10 years. These 100+ accomplishments consisted of regional, state, western regional, national and international awards. Members of the faculty and staff who have been at Harker for all of the past 10 years were honored
Christopher Nikoloff Kim Pellissier Brian and Eileen Richardson Marcia Riedel Gordon Ringold Joe Rosenthal Ruchi Sadhu Abhay Salukhe Archana Sathaye John Siegel Huali Chai Stanek Allison Vaughan Heather Wardenburg Carol Whitman
as they carried banners recognizing our numerous athletic championships while Greg Lawson, assistant head of school for student affairs, announced that our teachers are our students’ biggest fans. Sarah Leonard, primary division head, addressed the guests and said, “We all just love the Bucknall campus and cannot believe it has been 10 years. We are proud of the truly outstanding academic results our students have achieved during the 10 years that the lower school has called the beautiful Bucknall campus home.”
Carol Zink
Harker News — June 08, Capital Campaign Report
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CAPITAL
campaign
‘Parade’ Shows Long List
Construction Updates
And these are just a few! Please see the Web site for a complete list: go to Support Harker; Capital Campaign; Look How Far We’ve Come.
Activity will be continuing in high gear over the summer break. Every time you visit campus you can see the progress on the building. The glass in the rotunda is going up; in June, the seats will be installed in the auditorium. The final item to be installed will be the pendulum in the rotunda, after the granite floor has been laid in August. XL Construction is busily working to complete the project on time.
Two-Time Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer Spanish Poetry Contest Winners l 2005 & 2008 Gr. 3-4 Destination Imagination Teams to Nationals l Gr. 3 Team Two-Time California Math League Regional Champs - 2 students achieving National Honors l 50% of US are National Merit Scholars l American Society of Civil Engineers Contest: First Place l California Junior Classical League Five-Time State Champions between 2000-07 l CPSAL Girls Volleyball Championship 2000 l Jump Rope For Heart Featured On CNN Headline News l PSAL Boys Cross Country Championship 2007 l Outstanding Philanthropic Youth Group K-12 l Conservatory Invited to Edinburgh Fringe Festival l NorCal Girls Volleyball Champs 2007
Getting Ready for Moving Day! Anita Chetty, science department chair, and the rest of the science department are looking forward to moving in together from their current locations in three buildings across campus. “This will be a great chance for us to take stock of what we have on hand and truly work together as a team,” Chetty said. Helping coordinate the big move is teacher Eric Nelson. He has ordered a large number of boxes for the science and technology teachers to use while packing up their rooms. The daunting task for the teachers now is the need to pack up their fragile and delicate science equipment. Over the summer, these boxes will be carefully shuffled while waiting to move into the new building and as the old science classrooms are converted to nonscience classrooms. Nelson commented, “It’s like trying to remodel your house, but you have to work around all your stuff and you cannot move out.” At the beginning of August, the facilities and maintenance team will begin moving boxes into the new space and by the second week of August the teachers will begin unpacking their boxes and settling into their new classrooms. First year chemistry teacher Andrew Irvine said of the upcoming move, “I already knew Harker was a fantastic place; having a brand new classroom is just further evidence of Harker’s commitment to providing their teachers and students with the resources needed to succeed.”
Musical Classrooms: The Ripple Effect of the Technology Center The science department isn’t the only department that will be moving to closer proximity to each other for easy collaboration – every other department on campus will also be sharing in this benefit. By moving the science and technology classes to the new building, the school can move all the departments to classrooms near one another. Dobbins will become the home to all of the math classes; Shah will house the history and economics departments; the main academic building will house foreign languages, English and art. Over the summer, the facilities and maintenance team will be kept busy converting the science classrooms into nonscience learning space and expanding classrooms in the main academic building. Additionally, the majority of the portables will be removed from campus; the only portable that will remain will become the home to the growing orchestra program, providing the appropriate space for our orchestra to practice and store their instruments.
Two Teachers’ Views I was asked, some years ago, by Diana Nichols what I thought the science department “needed” in terms of teaching. I commented that given the quality of the people I have been working with, you could give us a cave, some charcoal to write with and a fire for light and you would still have pretty much the same outcome. The difference is not in the destination but the journey. It is in the experience received by the students and what we can do as faculty with all these new tools that makes the difference. It will appear when they walk into a lab and know what most of the equipment does and how to operate it; when they know proper practices for handling chemicals, biologicals or components sensitive to electrostatics; when they understand how an engineering team works and what it takes to successfully work in one. Few of these items are ever “tested” but all of them will open doors and provide a wealth of new, and often difficult to quantify, opportunities. I am looking forward to having sufficient space where I can set up multiple demonstrations at one time. As for Robotics, aside from the fact that my classroom will no longer resemble a mutant blend of a machine shop, storage room, fast food establishment, physics lab and teaching facility, the space will allow the students to learn “best practices” by actually doing them. In my current limited space the students must build up their working area after school from all the stuff that is stored in boxes in two different rooms. They then must pack it all away just a few hours later. They never have to work in a sustained environment so they never learn how to create one. If you always live out of a suitcase, you learn to pack really well, but you never learn how to establish a household. –Dr. Eric R. Nelson, physics and robotics teacher “I am very excited about the new multimedia room. This room will give the entire school community, not just the upper school, a facility where we have the ability to record video and audio of individuals and small groups. I envision the lower school and middle schools bringing their small performing groups to the multimedia room where we will record, edit and burn their performance onto CD/DVDs. This is an exciting time for The Harker School!” –Fred Triefenbach, assistant director of instructional technology
SAVE THE DATE! Ribbon Cutting, August 25, 2008 at 5:30 p.m.
The Harker School is a K-12 independent, coed, college-prep school. Grades K-5: 4600 Bucknall Rd., San Jose, CA 95130; Grades 6-8: 3800 Blackford Ave., San Jose, CA 95117; Grades 9-12: 500 Saratoga Ave., San Jose, CA 95129 Harker believes that all persons are entitled to equal employment opportunity and does not discriminate against its employees or applicants because of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions), national origin, ancestry, age (over 40), marital status, political affiliations, physical or mental disability, medical condition, sexual orientation, or any other basis protected by state or federal laws, local law or ordinance.
Everyone is invited. More information to follow!
The Harker News, produced by the Office of Communications, provides timely information, news and features about the Harker community to current and alumni Harker families. Director: Pam Dickinson; Editor: Catherine Snider; Writer: Emilie Robb; Production: Triple J Design; Photos: Mark Tantrum, unless noted; Printing: Harker Copy Shop; Mailing Coordinator: Desiree Mitchell.
Harker News — June 08, Capital Campaign Report