The AC Blog

Make Your Mark at the 2018 Gala!

Get ready for the celebration of the year in just 50 days: the Make Your Mark Gala on Friday, May 18th, 2018, at Oak Hill Country Club. You can go online now to sponsor the event, purchase an ad for your business or to recognize someone special, donate an auction item, host a table, or buy individual tickets at allendalecolumbia.org/gala. Next Friday, April 27th, is the last day to buy tickets!

Join us for an evening of fine food, friendship, and lively entertainment as we celebrate the many ways the Allendale Columbia community makes its mark on the world.

Sponsorships are available at several levels and include opportunities to host a table of 8 or 10 of your best friends, class parents, colleagues, or clients. With your sponsorship or individual tickets, you and your guests can enjoy good spirits, fine family-style fare, charitable auction action, and the impressive talents of Allendale Columbia students throughout the night.. Oh, and did we mention you will also have chances to win a variety of live and silent auction items, including vacations, one-of-a-kind experiences, and valuable local products and services?

If you would like to donate experiences or items for the silent or live auction, you can enter the information at allendalecolumbia.org/gala, or contact Kayla Himelein at khimelein@allendalecolumbia.org or 585.641.5288.

Your active participation will help us in the final push over the top for our 3-year, $4 million Impact Initiative Campaign that supports AC’s strategic initiatives and opportunities for students this year and in the years ahead.

Join us!

Upper School Presents Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass

Allendale Columbia’s Upper School students present Lewis Carroll’s play Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, adapted by Rosemary Nursey-Bray, on Friday and Saturday, April 20th and 21st, at 7:00 p.m. at AC’s Curtis Performance Center. Tickets are now available at acs.booktix.com for $8.00 (higher at the door).

Knowledge for College Moved to April 25th

Learn how to approach life after high school with the Knowledge for College Program, rescheduled for Wednesday, April 25th, at 7 p.m. in Allendale Columbia School’s Curtis Performance Center (CPC).

This event is an excellent opportunity for students and parents to learn about the College Advising Program at AC and to become educated about the current college admission landscape.  The program includes a panel of college admission counselors who will offer advice to families during these pre-college years and answer questions about the college search and application process.  For handout and cookie purposes, please click here to RSVP (please submit a new RSVP for the rescheduled date).

AC families are welcome to bring friends from other school communities to this program.

Kristin Cocquyt Unlike most of our peer schools, we have a dedicated full-time college advisor. Kristin Cocquyt's primary focus is to support, guide, and advise AC students on their college search and application process. She has been in the field of education for 13 years and has visited over 160 colleges, giving her a solid basis for recommending colleges that are great matches for our students. She holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Public Policy from Hamilton College and is a member of both the New York State Association for College Admission Counseling and the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

Parent/Student Conversation Night Reflections

Last week, in conjunction with our Upper School Parents of Allendale Columbia Kids (PACK) parents, we hosted our first ever parent/student conversation night at AC.  About fifteen US students and about twenty parents from grades 8-12 attended. The simple yet powerful objective of the night was to create conversation between teenagers and parents about important topics. Topics like:

• Academic Pressure
• Technology, Social Media, Gaming and Parent Monitoring or Regulation
• Sex, Dating, Relationships
• Drugs and Alcohol

Parents usually only talk about these things with their own children, and when they do, it is often in an argument or reactively addressing something that has gone wrong. Teenagers come away from those conversations feeling lectured, and parents often come away feeling a mix of confusion and frustration.

When I asked our US students for volunteers for this event, I had more than 30 students reach out to me wanting to participate. They don’t get anything for helping me, and they give up valuable free time in an already busy schedule of school, work, drama, an/or sports. This amount of student interest speaks for itself. Teenagers want to be heard, and they want to be better understood. Here are some examples of the prompts that were used, and if you would like to see the full list, please click here:

• How can a parent motivate a young person that isn’t taking advantage of all of the opportunities that they have?
• We don’t know much about you because you don’t share much. How can we know you better and have a better and closer relationship with you without compromising your independence?
• What if my beliefs, values, sexuality, or religion are not the same as what my parents want it to be?  What do I do? How can I be honest with them without hurting them?

By using two rounds of conversation with clear guidelines and structure, we were able to tackle some of these rich and important prompts in mixed groups of students and parents. As usual, my student leaders who were responsible for keeping the conversation on point were phenomenal, and parents and students both reported learning a lot. Some of the feedback we heard:

Parent: “I was surprised at the depth the students had. They really do think about this stuff deeply, and I was also reminded of how much it hurts when parents are critical or judgmental towards young people.”

Student: “Parents know a lot more than I thought.”   

After the event,  two juniors were very interested in continuing this tradition and holding more regular opportunities for students and parents to tackle vital topics, and I look forward to helping them lay the groundwork to make that happen.

Ryan Burke Ryan began his 16-year career in the field of education as a teacher with areas of expertise in literacy and special education. He earned a Master of Science Degree in Applied Behavior Science with a focus on family therapy, and he has done some work as a therapist. Ryan's primary focus in the field of education has been and always will be working in schools with students and their families. In addition to his role at Allendale Columbia as the Head of Upper School, Ryan is the co-founder of Leadership+Design (http://www.leadershipanddesign.org/), a non-profit organization dedicated to transforming the work of school leaders through professional development experiences.

8th Graders Welcome Honor Flight Veterans

Members of the 8th grade greeted veterans from Honor Flight Mission 58 at Rochester International Airport last Sunday, part of a collaborative Capstone Project between History, English, and Science centered on World War II.

Honor Flight is a non-profit organization that flies WWII and now Korean and Vietnam vets to Washington, D.C., to see the WWII, Korean, Vietnam, and other memorials. For many of these vets, now in their 70s, 80s, and 90s, this will be the last opportunity to see the memorials built in their honor.

(Photos by Andrew Ragan et al. Additional photos and video are available in this Google Photos album.)

Our students wrote over 120 personalized letters to the more than 50 Honor Flight Mission 58 vets. When the flight reaches 20,000 feet, the vets will experience their first “mail call” since their service days. According to Honor Flight representatives who have spoken to our students, the reading of students’ letters is one of the most emotional times of the trip for our veterans.

Honor Flight Rochester invited our eighth graders to a “Welcome Home” celebration at Rochester International Airport on Sunday, April 15th. Our students joined hundreds of people cheering on the returning vets and met and took photos with the recipients of their letters. It was a great way to show these military members of the “Greatest Generation,” the “Forgotten War” (Korea), the Cold War, and Vietnam how much we appreciate their service. They are “living history” that we must embrace while we can.

According to the Honor Flight Rochester website, this is the Rochester hub’s 10th year. AC has been involved since their second year, making this our 9th year of writing letters. We started after Juliana Levinson ’14 volunteered with Honor Flight back when she was in Upper School and asked if 8th graders could write letters. The Capstone Project combines 8th grade History, English, and Science and explores how the science and technology of World War II influences our lives today. It culminates in a science-fair-style Exhibition Night on May 14th with formal presentations to share their research paper findings.

Andrew Ragan Andrew came to teach Middle School History at Allendale Columbia School after 20 years in educational publishing and living in Pittsburgh, New York City, Los Angeles, Toronto, and the Adirondacks. He began writing for young people at Junior Scholastic magazine and has since published hundreds of articles in such magazines as JS, Scholastic News, Disney Adventures, Creative Classroom, and more. After teaching freshman composition at the University of Southern California for several years, Andrew served as the Senior Editor for Disney Adventures Magazine. He earned his Bachelor of Arts Degree in English and Communications, with honors, from Carnegie Mellon University and his master's degree in Professional Writing from the University of Southern California.

Save a Life at Blood Drive April 25th

You can be a life saver! Please consider supporting the Allendale Columbia School Community Service Club’s upcoming Blood Drive on Wednesday, April 25th, from 12:00 noon – 5:00 p.m. in the AC Alumni Gym, 519 Allens Creek Road in Rochester.

CLICK HERE to schedule an appointment using the sponsor keyword allendalecolumbia, or call the Red Cross at 1-800-Red-Cross. In only about an hour, donors can give a pint of whole blood or “Power Red”. A Power Red donation collects the red cells but returns most of the plasma and platelets to the donor. These donors must meet specific eligibility requirements and have type A Neg, B Neg, or O blood.

Those who donate will receive a free Red Cross t-shirt (while supplies last). Middle School students will also support the Red Cross with a bake sale at 10:30 a.m. in the Dining Commons.