News Articles and Recognitions
VCMS - State History Day
VCMS swept the individual exhibit category at State History Day! There were over 400 students competing in various categories today at CCSU. Morgan G. (8th grade) 1st place; Hayden R. (6th grade) 2nd place; Nicolas A. (8th grade) 3rd place. First and second place winners go to Nationals outside of Washington, DC so Morgan and Hayden are invited to compete from June 9-13 with students from all over the world!
ASTE Recognitions
We had two students earn state recognition for their FFA Proficiency Award applications. The proficiency is awarded to students who achieve excellence in their Supervised Agricultural Experience project. Tiffani Ellis earned fourth place in Small Animal Production & Management and Emily Syme earned FIRST place and is the state winner for Diversified Agricultural Production!
Agriscience students have been working on their research projects since last spring semester and their hard work has paid off! I am proud to share that we have TWO state winners - Nate Torres place FIRST in the animal science division and Emily Syme placed FIRST in the plant science division! They will have the opportunity to compete nationally!
RHS Writing Recognitions
RHS has five finalists in the 2019 "It's All Write!" National Writing Contest. Writers submitted an original flash fiction or poem that was judged by a panel of published authors. The awards ceremony to honor all of the finalists and to select the winners will be held on June 9 during the Ann Arbor Michigan Book Festival.
Congratulations to Emma Blanchet, Isabelle Fauteux, Emily Fisher, Venecia Fultz, and Julia Somma on this prestigious honor.
Cori Diaz's play, Sabotage has been selected to be part of the O'Neill Theater Center's 2019 Young Playwrights Festival. During the Young Playwrights Festival, student playwrights spend two days working collaboratively with a professional creative team consisting of a director, dramaturg, and actors to explore, revise and develop their plays, bringing their written words to life. The festival will culminate with a script-in-hand public reading of the students' work on Sunday, May 12 in the Dina Merrill Theater, Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, 305 Great Neck Road, Waterford; the performance is free and open to the public.
Venecia Fultz and Ashton Stansel represented RHS in the CT Slam Team Finals in Manchester on Sunday.
Congratulations to Venecia Fultz and RHS Alum Luke Perkins who made the 2019 ConneticWord National Youth Slam Team. They will be part of a slam team of five that will travel to the Brave New Voices Festival in Las Vegas this July.
RHS has nine state semi-finalists in the 2019 Letters About Literature Contest for which students write to an author about a book that has had an impact on their lives. These students placed among 96 other state semi-finalists out of close to 1000 competitors. This distinction is an amazing honor! Please congratulate the following students on their accomplishment.
Hannah Beeler-Lake, Jessica Donovan, Jen Gorski, William Johns, Kaitlyn Lawrence, Rachel Mathes, William Porter, Abby Tyrrell, and Sophie Wemmell
The RHS Drama Club performed the play Congruency at the Connecticut Drama Festival. The students did an amazing job in not only their performance but also their professionalism. I am excited to announce that Chelsea Koss and Ashley Fischer received an award for Best Student Written Play. Additionally, Chelsea also received an Honorable Mention in Acting award.
Phoebe Chung and Abby Tyrrell were honored at the Wallace Stevens Poetry Program at UCONN.
Congratulations to seniors Cori Diaz, Emily Fisher, and Julia Somma, who are 2019 Scholastic Art and Writing National Medal recipients! Cori received a gold medal for her dramatic script, Emily received a gold medal for her poetry collection, and Julia received two silver medals for poetry and flash fiction. Cori and Emily will be honored along with their teacher Vicky Nordlund during an awards ceremony on June 6th at Carnegie Hall. This year, over 320,000 works of art and writing were submitted to Scholastic regional programs across the nation, making these awards truly amazing accomplishments.
Venecia Fultz has been chosen to attend the prestigious New England Young Writers’ Conference at Bread Loaf, the oldest writers’ conference in the country. The event, which runs May 16-19th 2019 at Middlebury College in Vermont, gathers the best young writers from New England and New York to offer them a chance to learn with renowned fiction writers, essayists, poets, playwrights, song lyricists, professors and fellow high school students. Each year, admission is highly competitive and dependent on the applicants’ writing abilities.
Venecia was also selected as a semi-finalist in the 13th Annual High School Poetry Prize competition, sponsored by the Poetry Center at Smith College for sophomore and junior girls in New England and New York.
The Poetry Center at Smith College was founded in 1998 with the goals of bringing distinguished poets to the college, creating a video archive of their readings, and promoting an appreciation of poetry in the larger community through outreach to schools. The Poetry Center celebrates Smith's long and illustrious relationship with such world-renowned poets as Sylvia Plath, W.H. Auden, Richard Wilbur, and Adrienne Rich.
Congratulations to first place winner Phoebe Chung and second place winner Abby Tyrrell in the 2019 UCONN ECE Wallace Stevens Poetry Contest. Both students will be honored at a ceremony on March 13th in the Konover Auditorium at UCONN. Phoebe will receive a $250.00 prize and will read one of her winning pieces during the poetry program featuring poet Claudia Rankine. Abby will receive a $150.00 prize and an autographed copy of Rankine's book.
RHS writers are thrilled to have won two of the three prizes in this prestigious state competition!
The contest is open to students throughout New England. She will be published on their site and will receive a cash prize at a beautiful ceremony. (They give away over a $1000.00!)
Congratulations to Venecia Fultz, who took second place, and Ashton Stansel, who took third place, at the Connecticut National Youth Poetry Slam Team 2019 tryouts held on December 21st in Manchester, Connecticut. In front of a standing-room-only crowd, young poets from throughout the state battled with their words for a spot in the state finals and a chance to represent Connecticut at the Brave New Voices / International Youth Poetry Slam Festival in July.