Education Notebook: Big Surprise For Weightman Middle School Student 

Mayah Jaramillo hadn’t seen her brother, U.S. Air Force Airman E-2 Joel Jaramillo, the entire school year.

The graduating eighth grade student at Weightman Middle School had no idea that her mom and assistant principal Andressa Williams had been secretly planning to change that in a big way.

They’ve been plotting with Joel, stationed in Nevada, to get him home for her middle school promotion ceremony. They were hoping that when her name was called at the ceremony on May 25, Mayah would get the surprise of her life as Joel joined her on stage.

Plans were for Joel to take a red-eye flight to arrive the morning of the ceremony and sneak in the back door of the Wesley Chapel Center for Performing Arts on Wells Rd. to be there for his little sister’s special day.

Joel is a 2015 graduate of Wiregrass Ranch High (WRH), but the last time Mayah saw him was at his graduation from basic training last August.

Because of his commitment to serve his country, Joel wasn’t able to drive her to school for her first day of eighth grade, as he had for her previous three first days of school. (See photo.)

The surprise went off without a hitch, as a shocked Mayah burst out in tears as her brother came up from behind and surprised her.

WRH Ranked Nationally

Wiregrass Ranch High has landed on the U.S. News & World Report list of 2018 Best High Schools.

Less than 30 percent of high schools in the country qualify for the list, and only four other schools in Pasco County appear on it: Land O’Lakes, Mitchell and Sunlake high schools, plus the Pasco e-School.

WRH earned a “Silver” badge, meaning it was in the top 11 percent of U.S. high schools. The U.S. News & World Report analysis ranked the school number 117 in Florida, with a 91 percent graduation rate and 37.4 college readiness ranking, out of 100.

The college readiness ranking is a measure of how many students took and passed at least one Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) test before or during his or her senior year for the last year this data is available, which is 2015-16. (It does not consider students taking dual enrollment classes, which are a popular alternative to AP classes among high-achieving students at WRH).

“I can’t tell you how proud this news makes me,” said Kurt Browning, Pasco County’s superintendent of schools. “This is a testament to our administrators’ deliberate planning, our teachers’ high-impact instruction, and our students’ hard work and focus.”

For more information about Pasco’s schools on the 2018 Best High Schools report, go to USNews.com/education/best-high-schools.

High Schools Celebrate Graduates

Congratulations to the graduating classes of Wesley Chapel (WCH) and Wiregrass Ranch (WRH) high schools.

WRH students graduated on May 24, at the Sun Dome on the Tampa campus of the University of South Florida (USF). The school’s valedictorian is Sabina Grace Boddupalli, who plans to attend the University of Florida in Gainesville and major in Business Administration.
WCH’s valedictorian is Karissa Sue Olsen. After graduating with the rest of her class at the USF Sun Dome on May 25, Karissa is planning to return to USF for college, where she’ll major in Pre-Physical Therapy.

Cypress Creek Middle High School, which opened this fall, did not have seniors this year. Its first graduates will be the class of 2019 next year.

Quail Hollow Elementary Kid Cooks Fall Short At ‘Challenge’

The team from Quail Hollow Elementary (QHE; bottom photo on next page) that was one of four finalists in the fifth annual Gridiron Cooking Challenge at One Buccaneer Place didn’t bring home the trophy they coveted.

Fifth-graders Gracie Evans, Madison Gulley, Katelyn O’Neil and Lindsey Overland prepared their Alfredo Smothered Roasted Red Pepper & Sun Dried Tomato Pasta Swirls for the event, held on May 19 at the practice facility and HQ of the Tampa Bay Bucs.

But, they were bested by Lake Gibson Middle School in Polk County, which clinched the victory with its Quarterback Quesadillas with Pineapple Salsa recipe.

“It’s been another impressive year by our Tampa and Central Florida schools,” said Teresa Moran-Wiebe, Dairy Council of Florida, Director of Youth Wellness. “Each team demonstrated the versatility and nutritional value of dairy products in a creative way.”

The students’ creations were judged by Florida Dairy Farmer Courtney Campbell, Executive Chef of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers Michael Beadles and Publix Aprons Cooking School Chef Alan Landers.

Hosted by the Dairy Council of Florida in partnership with the NFL, the cooking challenge is a fun-filled food competition for elementary and middle school students throughout Florida and is part of the “Fuel Up to Play 60” program.

School & Hospital Partner Up

North Tampa Christian Academy (NTCA), which is under construction on County Line Rd. and set to open for the 2018-19 school year, has announced a partnership with Florida Hospital, naming it the “official health and wellness partner” of the school.

The new private school is currently being built on more than 43 acres of land. It is now accepting applications for students in grades K-12, while its on-campus preschool is accepting applications for kids ages two to pre-K.

The partnership is an obvious fit, as the NTCA is the culmination of plans that started in 2012, when the Florida Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists began working in concert with the Adventist Health System and Florida Hospital West Florida Region to establish the school in this area.

Sandra Doran, Ed. D, NTCA’s Founding Head of School, says, “We are so thrilled to have Florida Hospital joining us, as our official health and wellness partner. Our core values truly align and it’s all about the students, providing them unique healthcare opportunities both in and outside the classroom setting.”

NTCA will is inviting the local community to a ribbon-cutting ceremony, inviting the community to tour the brand-new campus, on Tuesday, July 17, 11 a.m.

For a virtual tour of the school, visit SeeThisSchool.com. An informational session for interested parents will be held on Wednesday, June 20, 6:30 p.m.–7:30 p.m., at Lincoln Memorial University Nursing School at Florida Hospital Health Park (3102 E. 138th Ave., Tampa). Call (813) 591-0309 for more info or to RSVP.

Local Schools Produce Award Winners

Clark Teacher Named Hillsborough’s Reading Teacher Of The Year!

The Hillsborough County Literacy Association (HCLA) has named Christy Gupta its Reading Teacher of the Year for all Hillsborough County schools.
Gupta is a fifth grade teacher at Clark Elementary in West Meadows, teaching English Language Arts (ELA). She was nominated for the award by the school’s principal, Paulette English, and assistant principal, Nicole Libby.

English says that Gupta is an engaging and dynamic teacher who supports many students outside of her classroom with school-wide programs, such as online Twitter book studies with other teachers.

In class, English says Gupta is creative and motivating, such as when she recently turned her classroom into an operating room to teach her students about “text features” using a “surgery” theme.

“We see that in the early grades a lot,” says English, “but we don’t always see teachers as engaging and making learning fun at the fifth grade level.”

New Tampa Schools Take Home PTA Prizes

Congratulations to the local schools, staff, parents and students who have received awards from the Hillsborough County Council Parent Teacher Association (PTA) for outstanding programs and efforts at their schools during the 2017-18 school year. Of 42 awards given throughout the county in elementary, middle, and high school divisions, 10 were taken home by New Tampa schools, including:

Elementary Schools:
• Education: Hunter’s Green Elementary, SMART Super Heroes

Middle Schools:
• Advocacy: Benito Middle School, Junior Blue Crew
• Family Involvement: Benito Middle School, School Beautification
• Health & Safety: Benito Middle School, Red Ribbon Week
• Local Unit Instructional: Liberty Middle School, Brendan Paul
• Local Unit Non-Instructional: Benito Middle School, Sharon Hineline
• Principal of the Year: Liberty Middle School, James Ammirati

High Schools:
• Outstanding High School Senior: Wharton High, Rachel Hineline
• PTSA President of the Year: Freedom High, Jeanine Ernst
• Volunteer of the Year: Wharton High, Michele Echols

Freedom Student Wins
‘All In For CF’ Scholarship
Freedom High senior Kira Taylor is one of 80 people nationwide to be awarded an “All In For CF” college scholarship for the upcoming academic year.
The $5,000 scholarship was awarded by Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Kira is a gifted musician and community activist,” said a Vertex representative. “She also happens to be living with cystic fibrosis.”
Kira will attend Hillsborough Community College this fall and is working toward an Associate of Arts degree. She then hopes to pursue a career in special education.

Wharton Turns To A Familiar Face By Hiring New Principal Mike Rowan

A change in leadership at New Tampa’s Wharton High is bringing in a familiar face back to the school.

Mike Rowan (photo), who currently is the principal at King High on N. 56th St., will take over as principal at Wharton on July 1.
While he’ll have some headaches to deal with, as he tries to repair Wharton’s reputation in the community, one thing will be much easier for him — the commute.
Rowan lives in Pebble Creek, just across Bruce B. Downs (BBD) Blvd. from the school. His daughter, Delaney, graduates from Wharton this spring.

Not only is Rowan a community member and parent, he also is a former teacher and administrator at Wharton. He was a social studies teacher and soccer coach when the school opened in 1997. Then, in 2006, he was named assistant principal for administration (APA) at Wharton. He served in that capacity for five years before being named the principal at King.

“I’m excited,” says Rowan, who acknowledges he will be facing some challenges at the school, including a negative perception about Wharton. However, he says, “there are a lot of community members — parents, kids and faculty — who want to get rid of that perception. The biggest asset that Wharton has going for it is that all of the people involved – parents, kids, teachers and the community — want (the school) to be successful.”

He says he is looking forward to using his experiences as a Wharton parent, community member, teacher and administrator to make sure, “we are all on the same page, going in the same direction.”

Rowan replaces current Wharton principal Brad Woods, who has been in that role since 2008. Woods announced his resignation to school families on April 12, effective at the end of the current school year. He will move to a position in the human resources department at Hillsborough County Public Schools, as the manager of services and support.

The appointments were made official at the Hillsborough Public Schools School Board meeting on May 1.

Congratulations To Freedom High’s Class of 2018 Valedictorian & Salutatorian


Catherine Weng says she’s never been interviewed before. She has, however, conducted plenty of interviews, as the editor of Freedom’s school newspaper, Revolution.

That’s far from her only role, however. The Class of 2018 Freedom High valedictorian is the definition of well-rounded.

She loves to dance and has studied at the Jansen Dance Project in Tampa Palms since middle school. She’s president of Freedom’s math honor society, Mu Alpha Theta, and has participated in competitions for that club since she was a freshman. She’s also the president of a club she created at Freedom for students who want to learn American Sign Language. Catherine also says she loves to bake, especially cookies and birthday cakes. Oh, and she has a part-time job as a tutor.

Catherine has finished her high school career with an impressive GPA of 8.9. She boosted her GPA well above a “perfect” 4.0 with a combination of honors, Advanced Placement (AP) and dual enrollment (DE) classes, which varied from computer programming classes to astronomy, to American Sign Language, which she really enjoys and isn’t offered at Freedom.

She says she got her first B this year in AP Spanish, where the challenge of being the only non-native speaker has made it hard to understand the wide variety of accents and vocabulary among those in her class. But, she says she doesn’t regret the hard class, “I really like linguistics,” she says. “I speak English and Chinese at home.”

Catherine is part of a large, blended family, and she says she’s especially close to her older sister Diana, who has earned both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Florida in Gainesville. Diana is still a student at UF, now working toward her Ph.D. in Accounting.

Knowing Catherine’s love of baking, Diana tried to sweeten the deal to get her sister to choose her school.

“She promised me a stand mixer if I came to UF,” Catherine laughs.

Despite exploring options as far away as New York and Seattle, Catherine ultimately decided to join her sister at Florida. She is a Bright Futures scholarship recipient, National Merit Scholarship finalist and a recipient of the Benacquisto Scholarship, which provides incentives for high- achieving students to go to a state university in Florida.

“I have such a good opportunity at UF,” she says. “I’m proud to say I’m a Gator.”

Given Catherine’s love for such a broad range of activities, it shouldn’t be surprising that she hasn’t quite nailed down what she’ll major in at UF. She’ll be in UF’s Honor College, and says she’ll most likely be a business major.

As Catherine leaves high school, she says she will take with her a philosophy to try to absorb the best things from the people around her.

“I’ve made a lot of amazing friends,” she says. “They have different skilIs and virtues and amazing things about them. I don’t know if I just got lucky to be at Freedom or if people are amazing everywhere.”

She’s about to find out about the people in Gainesville, at least.

“I’m happy to go to a ridiculously big school,” she says. “I’ll never run out of people to meet or things to do.”

Salutatorian Alejandro Michel
Freedom’s Salutatorian is Alejandro Michel, who had a GPA of 8.8. Alejandro also is a well-rounded student, who has excelled in both academics and athletics.

On Saturday, May 4, Alejandro graduated from Hillsborough Community College in the morning, after earning enough credits through dual enrollment classes — while a student at Freedom — to receive his Associate of Arts (AA) degree.

After the ceremony, he traveled to Jacksonville for the Florida Class 4A High School Track & Field State Championships, qualifying this year for the first time. He is primarily a cross country runner, but found success running track this spring, as he moved on from excellent finishes at the District and Regional meets to run in the State meet, too.

Before attending Freedom, both Alejandro and Catherine attended Liberty Middle School and before that, both attended Chiles Elementary, also in Tampa Palms, since kindergarten.

They have something else in common, too. As Alejandro heads off to Florida State University in Tallahassee, he is choosing to go to school with his brother, Max, who graduated from Middleton High and HCC this spring, as well.

“We plan to have our own apartment together, close enough to ride a bike to campus,” Alejandro says. “I’ve been riding my bike to school since Chiles and I want to keep doing that.”

Alejandro says he has two main loves — running and math. At FSU, he plans to major in statistics and minor in computer science. He is on an accelerated track so that he will finish both his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in just three years.

He says for his junior and senior year, he’s taken three math classes every semester, including AP Statistics, AP Calculus A/B and B/C, Calculus II and III and others. This year, he needed one more class at Freedom to keep his full-time status, so he chose Honors Trigonometry. “The teacher knows the level of math I have and lets me teach the class sometimes,” he says.

Alejandro intends to become an actuary — a mathematician who specializes in risk and probability. “Really, I would have loved to be a math teacher or professor,” he says, “but there’s a work/life balance you can get with being an actuary, working only 40 hours a week.”

He thinks that will leave him with enough time and financial stability to also pursue a career as a professional runner, with the flexibility to continue to train and run.

He says that on his journey so far, he’s learned about pursuing his passion and how that leads to success.

“Do you just want to be successful, or do you really enjoy waking up every day and getting out there and having a runner’s high?,” he asks. “You have to love the process, not just the idea of being successful.”

Wesley Chapel Elementary Odyssey of The Mind Team To Defend Its World Title

Wesley Chapel Elementary’s Odyssey of the Mind (OM) team is known as the 2017 World Champion elementary school team in the extracurricular academic activity that is a combination of technology and performance art. The WCE team gets to defend its title this weekend.

If you ask someone to name a world championship team from Wesley Chapel, the first thought might be the U.S. women’s national ice hockey team that trained at Florida Hospital Center Ice before winning the Gold medal at the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea earlier this year. 

But, for those who follow competitive mind games, the Wesley Chapel Elementary Odyssey of the Mind (OM) team is famous for winning the 2017 World Champion elementary school team in the extracurricular academic activity that is a combination of technology and performance art. According to the OM website (OdysseyOfThemind.com), OM is the “largest creative problem-solving competition in the world!”

Teams of students compete in grade-appropriate divisions to solve problems that require building and using a vehicle they can ride on while completing a triathlon of feats that display mechanical prowess and dexterity, such as jousting, curling and navigating a course in two directions.

The students compete from prepared routines they create, corresponding to a rubrik of requirements, such as a multiplication problem or something more spontaneous — like being asked unexpectedly to answer a question like “name a tree.”

It is a production that for the WCE team, known as “JJAMSSS” (the name is derived from the first initial of the name of each team member), combines a bit of pirate-speak and a boat that turns into a sea monster with a learning platform for science, technology, engineering, arts and math (STEAM) knowledge.

“The dynamic of this team is incredible,” says Joelisa Sherman, a parent serving as the team publicist. “They have truly learned the meaning of teamwork through perseverance, hard work, and a lot of creative thinking.”

Of the seven team members, six are fifth-grade students and one is in the third grade. Three of them are returning veterans from the 2017 World Championship competition that took first place at the OM World Finals at Michigan State University in Lansing.

Among them is Sam Cappelluti, who says that while performing as the lead sea monster can be good preparation for a possible career in life science, he really enjoys the time with like-minded students.

“I like thinking creatively and having fun with my friends,” Sam says.

Also adding championship experience to this year’s team is fifth-grader Jason Sherman, who says the atmosphere at the Odyssey World competition is not too unlike other big events, whether in education or sports.

“You develop great relationships with friends and there’s a lot of things to do there,” Jason says.

Mina Melaika is the third member of the team who competed for WCES last year, and she says it truly is an international event. “You go to a dorm and meet friends from Japan and trade pins and stuff.”

Third-grader Jadyn Sherman, Jason’s sister, says she enjoys crafts and finds the OM competition a good fit for her artistic skills.

“I saw the creativity in it and I like to make stuff,” Jadyn says, adding that participating in OM is “a really cool way to hang out with my brother (Jason).”

Anna Gust is a fifth-grader who says she appreciates the close-knit nature of her team and that she wants to “learn more stuff about inventing because, when I grow up, I want to invent stuff.”

The storytelling aspects of OM competition is of particular interest to fifth-grade student Samarth Muralidhara, who also says he’s finding an outlet for his curiosity about how things work.

“I like to see people laugh at my jokes and I love to do the pirate voice,” he says.

A new member of the team who brings about four years of experience is Sean Donahue, who has been participating in OM for four years. He has high expectations for the World Title defense, which will take place at Iowa State University in Ames, May 23-26.

“I’m especially excited for the Worlds, to meet new people and brainstorm,” he says.

Parents who are serving as coaches for the team are Jackie and Sergio Cappelluti, Sandy Gust and Elena Donahue.

The WCES team earned the right to compete at the World Finals by placing first in the Gulf Coast Regional and Florida State-level competitions earlier this year.