News
There's much news from June 2012 through May 2013 in our latest public newsletter, here.
More good news: July 24th: the Hispano Chamber of Commerce has named us the non-profit of the month for August 2012. The award was presented at their monthly Mix 'n' Mingle at the Meson de Mesilla. Click on the thumbnail images to see the larger images in new windows:
Our new development director, Marcus Crawford, just joined us on June 4th to help us raise founds for scholarships, our annual campaign, and our capital campaign. Please feel free to contact us about working with him, or donating. His contacts (phone, email) are available through the director's contacts, for the moment. Please see below. Thanks. Marcus also has been volunteering with the Children's Reading Foundation, contributing another link between us and the wider community.
Quilt raffle continued:
We are raffling off a beautiful, 100% cotton quilt made by Susan Houston, grandmother of one of our students. Tickets are $1 each or $11 for 10, and are available at the Academy and from a number of our students' parents. The drawing will be early next term when sufficient tickets have been sold. The winner need not be present.
Click here for a larger image.
We have winners for three partial scholarships donated by several generous friend of the Academy, for the upcoming 2012-2013 school year. Please click here for the full story and the winning essays written by the parents - and, in one case, one of our 2nd-graders.
We anticipate two new teachers joining us in August - a new math teacher, Robin Hastings, taking the place of Jorge Guevara, who moved to Atlanta, and a new Spanish teacher, Leticia Burbano de Lara.
[+Marcus Harold Crawford has
Board member Paul Deason has just been appointed to the New Mexico Spaceport Authority. Congratulations, Paul.
Twelve of our older students toured the Newman power plant of El Paso Electric Company with plant manager Pete Flores, on the morning of Tuesday, May 22nd'. Board member Vince Gutschick prepared the students in the preceding weeks with two presentations on how electric power is generated. Vince has been involved with EPE through his associations with Clay Doyle, Vice-President for Transmission and Distribution, and his presentation on liquid fluoride thorium reactors to EPE's Spring Engineering Conference. More than that, the whole school has shared a great relationship with EPE, which has given us scholarship money three years running. Back to the tour: the plant includes gas turbine generators that were the second to be installed in the US, as well as the ultra-efficient - and imposing - Newman 4 generator, comprising two giant gas turbines and exhaust heat recovery that drives a steam turbine. If you click on the thumbnail image below it will take you to a photo essay as a PDF document.
On May 19th, we held our end-of-semester potluck dinner, preceded by a review with student performances - comedy, science, Chinese stories and songs, and Spanish songs. All the parents also received their own copies of the student-written annual newsletter. A selection of images is available by clicking on the thumbnail image below.
Phonics program graduates:
Two of our teachers and one of our students graduated on May 11th from the very rigorous and world-leading phonics program of the Scottish Rite Hospital for Children. We have a brief story here.
Outreach programs: On Saturday, April 15th, Vince Gutschick, chair of the board of trustees, gave an eventful demonstration to 40 attendees about the many aspects of fire, at the Las Cruces Museum of Natural History. The series continued on May 19th when he presented Light and Color. Next in the series, on June 16th, is Math for the public: puzzles, growth, probability, primes, and more.
On Wednesday, April 4th, our students performed Chinese songs for the Cultural Diversity program in the Commons area of Dona Ana Community College. The program was a great success in everyone's eyes, including Confucius Institute teachers from China. More news and images here.
On Wednesday, April 4th, our students performed Chinese songs for the Cultural Diversity program in the Commons area of Dona Ana Community College. The program was a great success in everyone's eyes, including Confucius Institute teachers from China. More news and images here.
To benefit the Room to Read program, the World Food Programme, and the Academy's own building fund, on Saturday, March 31st at 2:00, the older students (2nd - 5th grades) performed 2 plays, Zak the Yak with Books on his Back, by John Wood, and Eight Fortunes, an adaptation of an ancient Persian fable as told by Aaron Shephard. They also sang a lively song, Friends (朋友), in Mandarin Chinese. An overflow crowd of parents, siblings, teachers, and community friends enjoyed the show. The event was recorded in high definition video by Dona Ana Community College volunteers from the Creative Media Technology program, Lamaia Vaughan and colleagues, and in stills by professional photographer Nico Banalas. Below here are a few stills taken by board chair Vince Gutschick; click on a thumbnail to see the larger image.
Donors and volunteers helping us to grow.
Please see the wealth of stories below, on our capital campaign, student generosity, and scholarships. Also, we treasure our volunteers who help teach special sessions in a variety of classes. Leticia Burbano de Lara has given engaging lessons in Spanish. You can see her in the make-believe tienda here.
Karen Caldwell has lectured on the planets and on art history. Polly Kamali, Gaylene Fasenko, Travis Turner, Natascha Preiss, and Kelly Price have worked with the students on silent reading.
You can volunteer to help us with some tasks. We're happy with the way the students are learning and with the enthusiasm of students and teachers alike. We want to keep all this going through the startup years, when we are still getting established, so we do need help. Read more.
A special kind of volunteer is needed to help us with our capital campaign...for which we are also seeking to hire a professionally-trained development officer. We have the call out for volunteers on the Web page of the United Way's Center for Nonprofit Excellence, with the direct link available here. We thank any of you who can volunteer in advance. Some of our students' parents have already helped, including Polly Kamali and Svetlana West.
New ways for donors to reach us. On our Giving page, we list ways that anyone may donate directly or by patronizing a variety of merchants. We have recently got ourselves listed on the site, NonProfitList.org 
. This is an active link if you wish to click on it.
Aretha Deng,the daughter of our Chinese teacher, Mei Dai, recently won the Junior Division Mesilla Valley Rotary Talent Show and was given a multi-hundred dollar cash award. Aretha decided on her own to donate the entire award to the Academy. We were very gratified by her generosity.
The Academy in the public eye.
Carlos Correa filmed us for a fine Newsmakers segment on KRWG-TV in late November. You can see the 2-1/2 minute clip on YouTube by clicking here.
In January, Carlos Correa had an extended interview with math teacher Jorge Guevara. Jorge elaborated on the strengths of the Singapore Math program, top-rated internationally, that we have used from the beginning.
- Out of the blue came an unsolicited, very helpful article about the Academy by the "Our heroes" writers at the wiz duh m site, which promotes good causes, and we're grateful that they see us so. You can see the Web article by clicking here. Thanks, wiz duh m!
- Community groups see the Academy: board chair Vince Gutschick gave a lunchtime presentation on the Academy to a very positive group, the High-Tech Consortium. His PowerPoint presentation will be posted on their Website, www.htcnm.com/, and we've made a link here to download it, too. Please see our home page, too, for news about a presentation at the Good Samaritan Village, coming up on February 3rd at 2 PM. Directions to the Good Sam conference room are available here
- We're working to bring our abilities in science, math, reading, and art to the public with outreach sessions. It's been a slow start to get engaged with the overly busy public schools, but we've worked up some exciting sessions to share. Here's a writeup of one in which we take flash pictures of balloons as they are popping. It's a PDF document, available by clicking here; if you need Adobe Reader to view it, you can download it here.
- We are frequently featured in the Las Cruces Sun-News, in the Las Cruces Bulletin, and on the radio on KRWG and KGRT. Look for us in these places. We appreciate our friends in the media.
Chinese New Year, 24 January 2012. Chinese teacher Mei Dai outfits the students for the celebration. Click on any thumbnail image below to see a large image in a new window.
Annual student newsletter.
The students have produced their own newsletter, which you can download below as a PDF file, or view it by clicking here if you have Adobe Reader. If you need Adobe Reader, you can get it by clicking here.
Our capital campaign and its big boost:
Our capital campaign is in progress. Please see the link on the navigation bar at right, or click here for a wealth of information. For a quick summary here: The Giles W. and Elise G. Mead Foundation of Napa, CA, reviewed the proposal we submitted to them...and their board voted to give us a $35,000 grant! This puts our campaign into high gear.
Why do we need a capital campaign? In brief, we've been so successful in growth of our enrollment, and we have the grand vision of a school of 350 students, while our present rental quarters, genial as they have been, cannot fit many more students. You can read a wealth of detail in the grant proposal to the Mead Foundation. The proposal is a PDF document viewable with Adobe Reader (get the Reader here if you don't have it yet)
Our goal is $1,000,000 and we hope to reach that in as little as one year, so that we can move into a final campus with our first school building for the next academic year. The generous grant from the Mead Foundation will have a big multiplier effect, showing other donors that we are credible by objective criteria, on our own merits, among people who have just come to know all about us.
The grant proposal is a great summary of who we all are - students, teachers, board, community supporters - and where we are going, how we have managed to date, and how the capital funds will be used. There are even more details in other documents. Please see our Capital Campaign pages. We are grateful to all 300 people and organizations who have donated to us in the past, in all amounts. They helped us immeasurably, demonstrating to the Mead Foundation and to future donors that we have support far and wide.
Our capital fund was also boosted by recent donations from Marc and Iris Chavez, Jean-Pierre Reinhold, the Boeing Corporation, Amudhu Gopalan and Champa Sengupta-Gopalan, Donovan Reed, Paul Deason, Connie Maxwell, T&E, Inc., teacher Paula Hines, and students Anna Garcia and Trey West. Together with past gifts by Jean-Pierre-Reinhold, Sangeeth Shanbhag, Gail Haggard, Marc and Iris Chavez, Catherine Abeele, R. Jeffrey Bowers, Debbie and David Cota, Kathy Roman, and Dahlia Reinhold, we now have a fund of $46,256!
Scholarships
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We put these funds and the donations from parents and friends -- which have totaled $10,455 to date -- to effective use. In December, 2011 and January, 2012 alone, we disbursed $3257.50 in partial scholarships to two current students and one recent student. We can always use more donations to keep deserving students in the Academy.
Science and technology demos
Growth in our faculty
Last but not least, we circulate a public newsletter, trying to get on a regular schedule of once a month. To find these newsletters, please click on News and then Archives in the navigation bar at right, or click here.