Powered by Business High Point — Chamber of Commerce and the High Point Community Foundation.
...
  • About
    • High Point Schools Partnership
    • Partners for Education
    • Did You Know
  • Public & Charter Schools
    • Elementary Schools
      • Allen Jay Elementary
      • Fairview Elementary
      • Florence Elementary
      • Johnson Street Global Studies
      • Kirkman Park Elementary
      • Montlieu Academy of Technology
      • Northwood Elementary
      • Oak Hill Elementary
      • Oak View Elementary
      • Parkview Village Elementary
      • Shadybrook Elementary
      • Southwest Elementary
      • Triangle Lake Montessori Elementary
      • Union Hill Elementary
    • Middle Schools
      • Allen Jay Middle
      • Ferndale Middle School
      • Johnson Street Global Studies
      • Penn Griffin School for the Arts
      • Southwest Guilford Middle
      • Welborn Academy of Science and Technology
    • High Schools
      • Andrews High School
      • High Point Central
      • Kearns Academy
      • Middle College at GTCC – High Point
      • Penn Griffin School for the Arts
      • Southwest Guilford High
    • Non-Traditional Schools
      • Allen Jay Middle
      • Dean B. Pruette SCALE Academy
      • High Point Newcomers School
      • Johnson Street Global Studies
      • Kearns Academy
      • Middle College at GTCC – High Point
      • Montlieu Academy of Technology
      • Northwood Elementary
      • Parkview Village Elementary
      • Penn-Griffin School for the Arts
      • Triangle Lake Montessori Elementary
      • Welborn Academy of Science and Technology
    • Charter Schools
      • Phoenix Academy
  • Private Schools
    • High Point Christian Academy
    • Hayworth Christian School
    • High Point Friends School
    • Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic School
    • The Piedmont School
    • Tri-City Christian Academy
    • Wesleyan Christian Academy
    • Westchester Country Day School
  • Articles
...
Find the perfect school
for your family in High Point

Select Your Criteria Below to Find Your Perfect School

May 27, 2021 0 Comments Schools in High Point Uncategorized Guilford County Schools Kearns Academy, Senior Spotlight
Senior Spotlight: Leslie Morales-Gallegos

Kearns Academy Senior Highlighted by Guilford County Schools

Leslie Morales-Gallegos calls her day planner her “best friend.”

She bought it at Walmart last summer for $12. Along with a handful of Paper Mate ink pens, all different colors, Leslie kept track of her online classes at Kearns Academy and her full-time job as a cashier at Elizabeth’s Pizza.

She needed to. Her schedule was crazy.

She was working at least 40 hours a week and took classes at both Kearns Academy and GTCC. She wants to save money for college and a car. She wants a Jeep or a Camaro. But she also wants to be the first member of her family to graduate from college.

First, she has to graduate from Kearns Academy of Computer and Information Science, one of Guilford County’s five academies earmarked for career and technical education.

Thanks to her day planner, she will. On Thursday.

The fun part is how.

The Entrepreneurial Side of Leslie

Like many high school students in Guilford County, Leslie wasn’t a big fan of online classes. She liked seeing her teachers and her classmates face to face. But because a global pandemic forced students to stay home, Leslie endured online classes last spring.

When online classes continued last fall, Leslie worried how she would handle it.

“This is crazy,” she told herself. “How am I going to manage and learn?”

Then, she got an idea. She always wanted to figure out a way where she could have a full-time job –– and go to school. But could she do it?

Since seventh grade, Leslie has socked way her monthly allowance. But she’s wanted to find ways to save even more money because she wants to go to college and not have her parents worry about those expenses.

They work hard, six days a week. Her dad, Marco, works in Winston-Salem shipping wholesale produce to restaurants. Her mom, Gabriela, works in High Point folding and packing socks at a hosiery mill.

Leslie always knew she had to pitch in to help her parents pay for her college. So, as she began her senior year at Kearns Academy in High Point, she began searching for her first full-time job.

She searched online and found one. Elizabeth’s Pizza in High Point hired her as a cashier in September. Leslie started working six days a week, with Tuesday being her only day off.  She began a schedule that had her finishing homework at all hours of the day.

That included 1 in the morning.

She needed help. She found it with her $12 day planner and her Paper Mate pens.

‘I’m Proud of Myself’

Leslie Morales-Gallegos

She used a blue pen for home chores and a pink pen for schoolwork or homework. She used a green pen for work and an orange pen for anything fun with her friends.

She’d get her weekly work schedule on a Saturday, and she wrote out everything for that week. She reviewed her day planner every morning, and she knew what days she had GTCC classes from 12 to 3 p.m. and what days she had to be at work at 4 p.m. for a six-hour shift.

Then, she figured out when to study, when to eat, when to shower, when to relax and when she could plan to see her friends Friday night.

Week after week, month after month, Leslie followed that schedule. She maintained her grades and began saving money for college and a car. She plans to go to GTCC for two years before transferring to UNC-Greensboro to study business.

Her structured schedule helped her dream. It also helped her sanity. She persevered. She was a full-time student with a full-time job who learned how to manage her time and her energy with the help of a day planner and a few Paper Mate pens.

“You know, it helped me tremendously,” she says of her day planner. “It was like my best friend. I was able to plan out everything I had, and it helped me keep focused. My time management improved because I wrote everything down on what I had to do.

“Not just work, but what I had to do at home and my private life. I’m proud of myself.”

The Benefits of Hard Work

Leslie Morales-Gallegos

After Northwood Elementary and Welborn Middle, Leslie chose to go to Kearns Academy because she wanted to become a certified nursing assistant. She also liked Kearns because she could take classes at GTCC, too.

She has taken a dozen classes at GTCC and gotten a jump start on college because of the dual enrollment.

Heather Jones, Kearns’ counselor, helped Leslie navigate her college schedule. Her English teacher, Gary Gray, helped her navigate her life. Gray, a teacher with 16 years of experience, answered her questions about schoolwork, college and beyond.

“He was somebody I could talk to and depend on,” Leslie says. “He was always there for you, especially when I wasn’t comfortable talking to my parents about schoolwork. He was somebody you could understand.”

As she edges toward college, Leslie also understands her parents and their journey.

They came together as a couple from northern Mexico more than 20 years ago. They wanted to find a better life and start a family. First came Leslie. Then came Alex, now an eighth-grader at Ferndale Middle School.

Leslie will now become the first in her family to graduate from high school and head to college.

“Knowing that helps me stay motivated,” she says. “I’m thankful for my parents’ sacrifice. They came to build a future for themselves and their future children. Now, my brother and I will have an opportunity to get a degree and do something we want to do. They wanted to make us happy.”

Are you?

Yes, Leslie says.

“I didn’t think I could do a full-time job and maintain my grades,” she says. “But I did, and it shows I can do pretty much anything I want to if I’m motivated. I’ve put in a lot of hard work. It’ll pay off eventually.”

Original story here: https://www.gcsnc.com/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&DomainID=4&ModuleInstanceID=174&ViewID=6446EE88-D30C-497E-9316-3F8874B3E108&RenderLoc=0&FlexDataID=146691&PageID=1

Read More
May 4, 2021 0 Comments Schools in High Point Uncategorized Allen Jay GCS, High Point Schools Partnership ..., HPSP, STEM kits,
STEM Kits Allow Students to Learn ‘Like a Real Scientist’
Stem kits

May 4, 2021 — Michael Davis vibrates with excitement as he peers into the small microscope on his desk.

Underneath the microscope’s plastic slide is part of an azalea bloom — a velvety white flower tipped with a hint of fuchsia. Michael, a fourth-grader at Allen Jay Elementary in High Point, bolts upright with a start and scribbles furiously on a blank sheet of paper. He repeats the process a few times, while his partner, Ariana Romero Lopez, patiently points a flashlight at the slide.

Michael reaches into his desk, feeling for some crayons. A touch of a pink … a little bit of green … and voila: “Here’s what I saw!” he beams, holding up his drawing for all to see. “It’s a flower, and it’s got green in the middle and lots of white and …”

But the other kids in Brittany Nunes’ science classroom pay him no mind. They’ve got their own flowers to observe.

Nunes’ students are among hundreds of third- and fourth-graders in High Point who are benefitting from the district’s new STEM kits — the generic name for interactive tools that help students learn science, technology, engineering and math.

stem kits

The $25,000 purchase was made possible by a gift from the Oak Foundation. A $30,000 donation allowed the Guilford Education Alliance to purchase the STEM kits and give the remaining $5,000 to the Teacher Supply Warehouse, says GEA’s Dawn Spencer, program coordinator of the alliance’s High Point Schools Partnership program.

The district had previously used its own money to buy STEM kits for the district’s fifth-grade science classes, but this is the first time that younger students have been able to use them. At Allen Jay, teachers are using the kits to supplement the traditional instruction they’ve been delivering to students for years. Only this time, kids are learning while doing, which boosts engagement and retention.

“The kits provide the same lessons through different perspectives,” says Carla Flores-Ballesteros, the school’s principal. “It opens up new horizons for them, in a sense. It gives them the opportunity to manipulate the materials, but it also develops critical thinking skills.”

In Nunes’ class, for example, the kits are augmenting a unit on the parts of a plant. She sent her students into the courtyard outside her classroom to gather small pieces of flowers or plants. Then they paired up and took turns either looking into the microscope or holding the flashlight. Once complete, they sketched out what they saw — hence Michael’s announcement to his classmates.

The following week, after teaching them about the pistil and the stamen and the stem, she asked the kids to pull out their drawings and label the parts.

Nunes didn’t realize how excited the kids were until one of them told her: “I didn’t know we’d get to use tools like a real scientist.”

“Ordinarily, there wouldn’t be a microscope for this unit,” she says. “For these students, that’s huge. It brings a level of engagement that wouldn’t have been there before.”

Academic research backs up Nunes’ anecdotal observations, showing that STEM courses in particular are well suited to hands-on learning, no matter what the students’ ages. A study by the University of Chicago revealed that students who physically experience the science they’re learning understand it more deeply and retain it more easily.

nunes and student

According to Spencer, the former principal of Allen Jay, the kits came at just the right time in the school year — as many students were transitioning from virtual classrooms back to the brick-and-mortar ones.

“These kids have been involved in remote learning for half the school year,” she says. “Now not only are they back, but they have these kits. This is what real learning is all about.”

A few classes down from Nunes’, students in Katherine Tuttle’s third-grade class are using a kit to learn more about animals — and not just your run-of-the-mill cows, horses and pigs, either. The kids are carefully cutting out pictures of various birds, fish and mammals in order to understand how they breathe.

Nine-year-old Naggelly Cruzamaya was considering matters, though: “I think they call it a macaw because that’s the sound they make,” she mused out loud to no one in particular.

Then, for good measure, she added: “Macaw, macaw!!”

Source: STEM Kits Allow Students to Learn ‘Like a Real Scientist’

Read More
High Point School News
  • Extraordinary Educator: Sandy McGoogan
  • Extraordinary Educator: Stephanie Powell
  • Extraordinary Educator: Vernee Rogers
  • Extraordinary Educator: Sheena Hyder
  • Extraordinary Educator: Katelyn Thompson
High Point School News
  • Extraordinary Educator: Sandy McGoogan
  • Extraordinary Educator: Stephanie Powell
  • Extraordinary Educator: Vernee Rogers
  • Extraordinary Educator: Sheena Hyder
  • Extraordinary Educator: Katelyn Thompson
  • Extraordinary Educator: Sandy McGoogan
  • Extraordinary Educator: Stephanie Powell
  • Extraordinary Educator: Vernee Rogers
  • Extraordinary Educator: Sheena Hyder
  • Extraordinary Educator: Katelyn Thompson
...
Schools In High Point
  • 1634 N. Main St., High Point, NC 27262
  • (336) 882-5000
  • info@bhpchamber.org
© 2023 Business High Point — Chamber of Commerce. All Rights Reserved.
nexos_copyright

Log in to Schools In High Point

New to Schools In High Point ? Create an account