Good News From Sanford Schools: March 9, 2022

Compiled from staff reports and Facebook posts

Sanford High School

The Sanford High School Jazz Ensemble (pictured above) had the opportunity to perform at two jazz festivals in February! They traveled to South Portland High for the District 1 festival, as well as to Westbrook Middle School for the MBDA jazz festival. This week the Winter Guard, Winter Percussion, Jazz Ensemble, and Concert Band are all performing in the Instrumental Showcase in the SHS Competition Gym.

Sanford Regional Technical Center

Students in the Engineering Applications with Robotics Program at SRTC are preparing to complete in FIRST Robotics events in Waterville, ME and Portsmouth, NH in the next month. These challenging events are described on the FIRST website as the “Ultimate Sport of the Mind.” The website further describes the events as follows, “Under strict rules and limited time and resources, teams of high school students are challenged to build industrial-sized robots to play a difficult field game in alliance with other teams, while also fundraising to meet their goals, designing a team “brand,” and advancing respect and appreciation for STEM within the local community.” This year, our team has been working diligently to design, build, and program a robot to succeed in the game, which involves launching a ball into hoops at various heights and maneuvering the robot to climb.  If this is hard to visualize, check out this video of the robot in action. Best of luck to our students as they compete in the first events to be held in person in two years. The photo shows students from the AM session of the program posing with the robot for this year’s events. 

Sanford Middle School

SMS has a new Aquaponics program. Activities include water changes; feeding, weighing, catching and harvesting fish; pruning and harvesting plants; planting seeds; delivering tank water to teachers; testing water quality; problem solving issues with equipment and designing new additions to the system. LC & Math Kids are learning about Aquaponics to possibly join in on helping the program during tutorials.

Carl J. Lamb School

Some CJL 1st and 4th graders participated in “Creative for a Cause” and made these wonderful drawings of animals that are available for adoption at the Animal Welfare Society shelter in Kennebunk.

Margaret Chase Smith School

As part of our character trait of the month, creativity, classrooms were challenged with redesigning their classroom doorways. Students were busy the week before vacation showcasing their creativity to honor our coyote mascot.

Ms. Tibbetts had all of the MCS athletes in training during the Winter Olympic games.  Students were able to carry the torch to ignite the games during their warm up routines before transitioning to the skeleton, bobsled and speed skating challenges.  You could hear chants from around the building supporting each athlete as they crossed the finish line.

Sanford Pride Elementary School

Tie Tuesday is a competition that started at Willard School over five years ago. At first it was just a small group of teachers wearing ties on Tuesdays. As time moved on, official voting among students and staff started. Anyone that wears a tie on Tuesdays has their photo taken, the photos are put onto Google Classroom for students to vote for. For the staff and classrooms that don’t use Google Classroom, an email is sent with the pictures of the ties. Anyone that receives the email and wants to vote, just responds with their vote. On Tuesday of the next week, the voting is made public.

This competition has allowed for a positive community to be created throughout the school. Two weeks ago, there were 19 competitors, including 14 students. The kids love looking at the ties and telling the teachers which tie they are going to vote for. Some of the teachers that participate will venture into the classrooms at grades they don’t teach, to try and build up support for their tie. Some might think of this as trying to buy voters, but it actually helps to get to know more faces throughout the building. Not only does this help the community within the building, but it also helps former Willard students stay connected to what is going on in their old school. If a child who has moved on to the Middle School is interested, they can still vote for Tie Tuesday as long as they keep “Tie Tuesday” as a part of their Google Classroom. On a weekly basis we have anywhere between 25-50 former Willard students voting.

It has been great to see the kids participate and get excited about this part of our school. We have even had three students win so far this school year.

St. Thomas School

Seventh and eighth graders participated in the “Great Brownie Bake-off” as part of their E-GOAL time elective (culinary arts). In addition to dessert, they’ve cooked a full pasta meal and plan to tackle appetizers next. Delicious!

Sanford Christian Academy

Congratulations to our four players (Canton Hill, Cole Foster, Lehana Petelo, and Candice Foster) who made it to the all star game in Turner, Maine!!

Sanford Community Adult Education

The Sanford Community Adult Education Spring brochure will be in mailboxes soon! Our brochure will be inserted in the Register Gazette so be on the lookout! You can register for a class online, in person, via a phone call, or mail in the registration form found on the back cover of our brochure.