News & Events

For the fifth year in a row, we will be hosting a Maple Brunch! Come taste the maple syrup we make here at Rock Point and drizzle it on everything from pancakes to bacon to yogurt! If you'd like to work up your appetite before brunch, we will have a fun 5k run through our beautiful lakeside property. As usual, tours of our sugaring operation and sugar house will be available throughout the morning. See the schedule of events below. We hope you can join us!

The Rock Point School students are celebrating Pi Day a little early by hosting a make-your-own mini pie event on Saturday, March 12th from 2:00-3:00 pm. Students will be available to help youngsters fill, bake, and enjoy their own individual pies. Please forward this message along to those who may have little ones excited to participate! RSVP to Kate McKernan ( kmckernan@rockpoint.org).

Our travelers returned from Nicaragua on February 24th with lots of stories to tell! Students spent a week immersing themselves in Nicaraguan culture and learning from the people they met. Through Compas de Nicaragua, students spent time with Women in Action in Managua, learning how they support their families and community. Students also traveled to La Paz and worked on a variety of projects including: helping a family build an indoor shower, putting roofs on houses, creating a gray water system, and using manure to make methane gas cook stoves. Other highlights of the trip included:

It's time to get ready for our annual dramatic peformance! For the past several years, we have performed student written plays in conjuction with the Vermont Young Playwright Festival. This year, our production has evolved even more! The plays have become a focus for our Project Based Learning. Project Based Learning is a teaching method in which students gain knowledge, skills, and experience by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to a complex question, problem, or challenge. Teachers are working to include more project based learning in their individual curriculums and we also wanted to create a school-wide project. In this case, the challenge is collaborating to produce a performance and event!

(photo taken at the Yelardy-Morganstern home before they took off for the airport)

Each year our staff members (headed by Emily Skoler) compose a Valentine poem to the students and perform this poem at a school wide event. This year, the students outdid the staff and wrote a sweet (and funny) poem dedicated to the staff! Seniors Max and Micah read the poem and even joined the staff wearing sparkly Valentine accessories. We love this silly, fun tradition and hope to keep reading ridiculous rhymes to one another for years to come. Here are few verses from the student written poem:

Like many people, we do not take Martin Luther King Day "off;" instead we chose to honor his legacy through service. This year, our history teacher, Gus, had students listen to King's most famous "I Have a Dream" speech and then led a discussion on social justice and preserving/promoting rights. Students discussed the roles of bystanders and collaborators, and the differences between empathy, pity, and sympathy.

Because of the overwhelming response to our event last month, The Enigma of Adolescence: Decoding our 21st Century Youth with Dave Melnick, we are hosting a follow-up dialogue on January 27th to focus on the challenges of growing up, parenting, and working with adolescents in the digital age.

Our resident beekeeper, Gus Buchanan––also known to Rock Point School students as their history teacher!––was invited to be a visiting lecturer at a high school in the Bahamas, in their agricultural studies curriculum. He gave two lectures to the school. His other duty while there is to teach students to build hives, and to capture some wild bees that located in homes and trees and install them in the hives that the students are building. Unfortunatley, customs held up many of the supplies we sent down, so rather than be able to build Langstroth hives, Gus is teaching the students to build top bar hives out of local resources. Gus and some students successfully cut open the wall of a home, removed a hive that had lodged there, and placed it in the hive that students constructed––with no one getting stung! We look forward to future involvement with South Andros High School, with cultural exchange and service learning opportunities for our students and theirs.

Our favorite moments during the school year are when alumni come to visit us or get in touch with an update! It was great to see Bapi B, Ben P, and Will S recently. Bapi, RPS class of 2011 and a graduate of Roger Williams University, is now working as a researcher at the Naval War college where he is persuing his interest in observing the threat various insurgent and terrorist organizations pose to stability in South Asia. Ben, RPS class of '11 and a graduate of Mitchell College, is working in Washington D.C. in the political arena. Will, RPS class of '12, is enrolled in Mountain Guide School and is working as an educator at The Outdoor School.