GMHS Principal’s SHOUT-OUT!
Every Thursday there is a Principal’s SHOUT-OUT! message to students expressing praise, admiration, support, and confidence. Enjoy!#positivesignthursday #proudprincipal
Nov 15
Congratulations Georgetown Cheer!
The Georgetown Cheerleading team added to its trophy case, capturing the Division 4 North sectional title on Sunday at Methuen High School. The Royals are lead by Head Coach, Tracy Wood, whose is in her 7th season, Assistant Coach Tracey Zimirowski and senior captains, Destini Odle, Cassandra Arriel, Julia D’Entremont and Jordan Sanger. The Royals have taken the Cape Ann League Title in back to back years and have finished in 1st place in all of their competition this year. With its victory, Georgetown will now advance to the Division 4 state championships, which will be held at Worcester State on Sunday, Nov. 18. (TIme TBA)
Young Inventors Competition
Congratulations to the following students from the GMHS Creativity class who elected to participate in the Young Inventors Competition:
- 10th grade 1st place – Taylor Steeves
- 9th grade 1st place – Jenna Tabenkin
- 9th grade 2nd place – Maggie Jackson
- 9th grade rd place – Lauren Bartlett
” The annual Regional Invention Convention provides students the opportunity to share their creativity with their peers and to receive recognition and be awarded for their efforts. It challenges the strongest inventors to come together to learn from one another while they compete!
The event will be held at Southern New Hampshire University on Sunday, March 25, 2018. Sponsored by Fidelity Investments, the celebration brings together approximately 200 students to showcase their creativity and problem-solving skills and be rewarded and recognized for their efforts and typically draws a crowd of approximately 500 friends, family, and supporters.
Award medallions are awarded to students, as well as sponsored specialty awards. The experience isn’t about the winning-it and more about the fun in learning! “
Those who place at the regional competition will have the opportunity to go to the National competition at the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan.
Veronica Lewis Receives National Recognition
This Drone—Invented by a High School Student—Could Save Marine Animals
(Courtesy Veronica Lewis)
Thousands of cetaceans—whales, dolphins, porpoises—strand themselves on beaches every year worldwide, and more than half die. In spite of decades of research, scientists aren’t quite sure why, or what to do about it. But one concerned high schooler has found a solution that’s making waves.
Enter Veronica Lewis, 15, a Georgetown High School sophomore in Haverhill, Massachusetts, who’s been obsessed with whales ever since she read Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick in fifth grade (yes, fifth grade). It “really affected me,” she says. A week at the University of Connecticut’s oceanography school at age 12 reinforced her interest and her dismay at how many cetaceans die in what are called “strandings” every year. (In a single mass stranding in New Zealand in 2017, 350 pilot whales died.) Veronica, former captain of her middle school robotics team and an accomplished blues musician (she sings, plays piano and writes her own songs), was at her local aquarium when an idea struck her: “What if I used sound to help them?”
(Courtesy Veronica Lewis)
“I knew the whales respond to echolocation and sound,” she says. “And music is a big part of my life. I thought, They have songs; I have songs.”
Extensive research—including interviews with experts in Hawaii and Scotland—followed as Veronica developed a prototype for a device she christened the NOMAD, Navigational Ocean Mammal Assistance Drone. It’s a drone on pontoons, with a submergible speaker that plays pre-recorded whale and dolphin songs to lure marine mammals away from shallow water and back out to sea. It can also serve as a barrier to prevent cetaceans from entering shallow water in the first place. The final version will be 10 to 20 feet long.
The NOMAD earned several awards at the Northern New England Regional Invention Convention in March and has captured the interest of the New England Aquarium, the Marine Mammal Alliance Nantucket (Massachusetts) and the Discovery Channel.
When she’s not inventing, Veronica plays a mean boogie-woogie piano (veronicalewis.com) and volunteers with the community service project she founded (valorparatodos.com), where kids exchange language skills to help each other learn (native Spanish speakers teach Spanish to native English speakers and vice versa).
“When I was 14 I was eating Oreos and watching The Brady Bunch on a black-and-white TV,” says Veronica’s mom, Nancy Leotta Lewis, with a laugh. “I don’t know where this child came from.”
