Old Courts To Be Turned Into Fields For Public Use

Townhalls and other community meetings may sound boring to many, but sometimes, they produce action that otherwise wouldn’t happen.

Alexandra Gilmore, a Tampa Palms resident since 2007, attended one hosted by Tampa City Council member Luis Viera and other city planners back in 2020 and when she took the mic, she wanted to know why there weren’t more — or any, actually — public basketball courts in New Tampa.

Her boys, Caleb and Bryce, had searched for places to play, but were always booted off the courts.

“You have to live in a community that has them, or a certain neighborhood, or have a membership somewhere,” Alexandra remembers telling city officials. She told Viera and the others there were courts and space behind Liberty Middle School that could be used but were fenced off to keep kids out.

“Why can’t those be public?,” she asked.

It was a great question, and one that finally got answered on Aug. 25, when the Tampa City Council voted 5-0 to pitch in with the Hillsborough County School District to spend $1 million to upgrade the aged tennis courts behind Liberty.

 Gilmore had no idea her suggestion had even become a reality until the Neighborhood News called her.

“Oh my goodness,” she said. “You’re kidding me! This is absolutely amazing!”

Gilmore stayed in touch with Viera via email while the councilman did the pushing behind the scenes to initiate the project. The Tampa City Council agreed to enter into an interlocal agreement with the School District to improve some of the athletic facilities that adjoin Liberty and Freedom High.

The current facilities — six hard court tennis courts — between the two schools will receive a new design and a court cover to shield those playing from the elements. 

The “all-fields facility,” as it is called, will feature three resurfaced and outfitted courts for basketball, tennis, pickleball or volleyball, depending on the needs. The other three existing tennis courts will be replaced by an artificial multi-purpose turf field and will be covered. Restrooms also will be a part of the new facility. 

The School District will control access to the fields and their usage — most likely for recess and other school-related activities — during daytime hours when Liberty and Freedom are in session. The city will control public access in the evening hours and on weekends.

“Utilizing unused school space for recreation activities for the larger communities, including basketball…is going to be a great thing,” said Viera, who represents the New Tampa area in District 7.

The cost of upgrading the courts is expected to be roughly $1 million, and the City Council voted that the city would pay up to 50 percent, or $500,000, of those costs, using Capital Improvement Plan funds.

During the public comments portion of the City Council meeting, only one person, South Tampa’s Stephanie Poynter, commented and she was in favor of making the courts open to the public. 

“If the City of Tampa is paying half for the basketball courts at Liberty and Freedom schools, those courts should be accessible 24 hours a day if the schools are not in session,” she said. “This is the only place I have ever lived where every single school has a fence between it and the kids who live around it. I’ll never understand that.”

Before the vote took place, the motion was pulled for discussion by District 3 Council member Lynn Hurtak. She favored the interlocal agreement, and asked that the city’s Parks & Recreation Department explore more opportunities like this. 

“How when many of us when we were kids, that at our neighborhood school, after school, we could go play on the playground, in the field, on the basketball courts, do it on the weekends, do it all summer?,” Hurtak asked. “Now, with the advent of school shootings, many of those open spaces have been fenced off for student security, and they don’t allow the public to utilize those facilities, which is a bigger strain on our parks system. So, when I saw this interlocal agreement, I was really excited about it. “

Viera made a point of crediting Gilmore during the meeting. 

“This is going to be a wonderful thing,” Viera told the Council.

Gilmore agrees.

“I remember a couple of people reached out to me after that meeting in 2020 to thank me,” said Gilmore, who was running for the Hillsborough County School Board at the time. “This will be great for kids in the local neighborhoods to have a place to play.”

Award-Winning High School Artists Featured In Local Exhibit

Submissions by 11 New Tampa teenagers were chosen as award winners in the 2022 Hillsborough Region Scholastic Art & Writing Awards Exhibition. Of more than 1,200 entries, judges chose 231 art awards and 95 writing awards.

Wharton High senior Brianna Lee picked up three photography awards, including Three Bodies (right) being chosen as one of just five American Visions Nominees. The nominees are chosen from among all Gold Key winners, and one of the five will be selected the overall winner by a national panel. Brianna won a second Gold Key award for Caked On Disguise, and Faultless was chosen as a Silver Key winner.

Brianna describes their artwork as inspired by Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, lust and beauty. 

“There are only two models in this picture: one model with a beautiful full figure with well-defined curves and the other with a tall, slim frame,” she says. “By overlapping the two photos of the two different body types creates a semi-distorted, unusually small body in the middle. This is also another body type that some people strive to change themselves to. I hope this work can show that there really is no perfect body type and that it will constantly change time and time again, and no one should feel the need to change along with it.”

Gold Key winners will be submitted to the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers in New York City, where they could be selected as national winners and recognized in a ceremony this summer.

Several other Wharton students also were recognized:

• Sabrina Valencia won a Gold Key award for the digital art piece Body Water, which also won a Judges’ Award, and a Silver Key award for Dyssoconnected.

  • The Vulnerability of Black Men by Terance Eady
  • We Eat the Mushroom The Mushroom Eats Us by TAylor Vanderpuyl

• Taylor Vanderpuyl won a Gold Key award for the photograph We Eat the Mushroom The Mushroom Eats Us which also won a Judges’ Award, and an Honorable Mention for Megan. 

• Terance Eady won a Gold Key award for the photograph The Vulnerability of Black Men. 

Honorable Mentions were awarded to Isabella Ancheta for the photograph Reflections and to Pranshu Modi for the painting Tokyo. 

These students are all taught by Wharton art teacher Curt Steckel.

Honorable Mentions also were awarded to Benito Middle School students in the drawing and illustration category. 

• Ananya Dongre won for The one who makes me smile and Frances McKoen won for Medieval Battle.

These students are taught by art teacher Cheyenne Causby.

Freedom High had three writing award winners, all taught by English teacher Robert Counts. 

Frankie Vilsaint won a Silver Key award for his dramatic script The Egg Thief. 

In the science fiction and fantasy category, two students were awarded an Honorable Mention, Haileigh Mereness for Beating Hearts and Jayden Mujica for Dark World. 

The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, established in 1923, is the longest-running, most prestigious recognition program for creative teens in the United States and claims to be the largest source of scholarships for young artists and writers. Previous winners include Stephen King and Andy Warhol.

This is the eighth year that the Hillsborough County Public Schools and the Hillsborough Education Foundation are serving as the regional affiliate for the national award program.

The Hillsborough Region Scholastic Arts & Writing Awards virtual awards ceremony is available online at EducationFoundation.com/2022ScholasticArtandWritingAwards. These and other award-winning works are on display at the University of Tampa’s Scarfone/Hartley Gallery (310 North Blvd., Tampa) through Friday, March 25. The gallery is open Mon.-Sat., 10 a.m.-6 p.m.

Climb To The Top No Easy Task For Freedom Valedictorian

Taravat Tarahom didn’t get to bask in the glory of being Freedom High School’s Class of 2020 valedictorian, thanks to the outbreak of Covid-19 cutting short her senior year. Nor did she get to give her speech in front of a throng of her classmates in an arena, instead settling for a safe and socially distant recorded message.

What Taravat says she did get out of being Freedom’s valedictorian, however, was a life-altering accomplishment at the end of what, at times, was an extremely difficult journey.

“This has taught me to look at one goal, but not make (that goal) my entire life,” the 18-year-old says. 

She was able to balance a huge school load, deal with the divorce of her parents and the death of her dog, as well as a diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes, all while unexpectedly rising to the top of her class.

Taravat walked away from Freedom with a greater appreciation of her relationships and health and with the piece of mind that comes from learning how to stay prioritized.

“The experience definitely changed me,” says Taravat, who finished with a 7.64 weighted grade-point-average.

Leyla Mohebbi, her mother, says she couldn’t be more proud. She says academics have always been a priority in her home, where bringing home a B meant you would be asked, “Why not an A?”

“I feel like Tara put the expectation onto herself that she did not want to be anything less than a valedictorian,” Leyla says. “I’m very happy. I knew that was her dream, and she made it happen.”

Taravat has followed in the footsteps of her sister Targol, who was Freedom’s valedictorian in 2015 and is now in medical school at Nova Southeastern University College of Osteopathic Medicine in Fort Lauderdale. Taravat says she felt the bar was “set impossibly high” before she even started high school. She faced a steady climb up the academic ladder, ranking only around No. 25 in her class after her sophomore year.

She remembers moving up in the class rankings after the first semester of her junior year, somewhere into the teens, and her determination to become the second valedictorian in the family was growing. 

She mentioned to some of her classmates and her teacher in AP Biology that she was going to go for it, and they laughed, because she still had more than a dozen students to pass. 

“That set something off in me,” Taravat admits.

A former cheerleader, she started her senior year ranked No. 7 in the class, but once her summer grades were input into the system — “I had a crazy workload that summer” — she had quietly risen to No. 3. But, she stayed under the radar, and continued to take a heavy load.

Taravat, who was co-president of the school’s Sierra Club, says a typical day in the fall of her senior year would entail waking up at 7 a.m. for six hours of school at Freedom, then coming home around lunchtime to eat and pack herself a dinner, and working for three hours as an online tutor, driving to the Hillsborough Community College (HCC) Ybor City campus for a three-hour English class and then heading over to the HCC campus on N. Dale Mabry Hwy. for physics lab. 

In February, she found out it was official — she had quietly risen to the top of her class. She called Leyla. They cried.

Even More Challenges

The hard work did not come without a cost, however.

In December, she had lost 15 pounds and spent two days in the hospital, where she was diagnosed with Type 1 (juvenile) diabetes. “I was so wrapped up in school I didn’t even pay attention to my health,” Taravat says. “I was kind of mad at myself for not noticing.”

Her diagnosis has triggered an interest in endocrinology, which she hopes to study at the University of Florida. She plans on majoring in microbiology and cell sciences.

And while her valedictorian speech wasn’t delivered to a crowd of her classmates, it did come from the heart. Without the trials and tribulations of her senior year, it might have been a completely different speech.

“Remember this,” she told the Class of 2020. “If you fall: get back up. It’s cliché, I know, but get back up. Don’t allow setbacks to steer you off your natural path. Don’t let a single failure ruin those deep-rooted hopes and dreams. Because ultimately, rock bottom could be the solid foundation that you build the rest of your life on.”

School News: Lots Of Awards To Go Around

Isabella Douglas

Wharton senior Isabella Douglas was awarded a $500 scholarship and the Wharton Naval Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (NJROTC) program received $1,000, thanks to an essay Isabella wrote for a nationwide NJROTC contest.

The Surface Navy Association (a 501(c)(3) nonprofit Association incorporated in 1985 to promote greater coordination and communication to those in the military, business, and academic communities) offered the contest to NJROTC cadets across the country, choosing Isabella’s entry as the most outstanding nationwide. The award was provided as an incentive to “engage NJROTC cadets in understanding and appreciating the sacrifices of our WWII veterans, Navy core values, and what it means to be a shipmate.”

Isabella will use her award while attending the University of Florida in Gainesville, where she plans to major in journalism.

Although her current plans don’t include joining the military, Isabella comes from a military family. Her mom was in the U.S. Army and her dad was in the U.S. Coast Guard.

She credits Wharton’s NJROTC program with teaching her important life skills. “It taught me how to be a better leader, to be more organized, and (how) to talk in front of a lot of people.”

Isabella says she was excited to hear that her efforts not only benefited her, but also the school’s NJROTC program.

“I was really glad about that,” she says, “because it’s my last year and I was happy to give back to the program.”

National Merit Scholars Announced

New Tampa’s residents Arpan Bagui and Shezad S. Shah were named as $2,500 National Merit Scholarship winners by the National Merit Scholarship Corporation (NMSC) on May 13.

Bagui lives in K-Bar Ranch and attends the IB program at King High and is looking to study investment banking in college, while Shah is a Wharton senior who plans to study computer science in college.

Arpan Bagui

The $2,500 Merit Scholar designees were chosen from a talent pool of more than 15,000 finalists in the 2020 National Merit Scholarship Program. 

National Merit $2,500 scholarship winners are the Finalists in each state judged to have the strongest combination of accomplishments, skills, and potential for success in rigorous college studies. The number of winners named in each state is proportional to the state’s percentage of the nation’s graduating high school seniors. 

Scholars were selected by a committee of college admissions officers and high school counselors, who considered the academic record (including the difficulty level of subjects studied and grades earned). scores from the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT®), contributions and leadership in school and community activities, an essay written by the Finalist and a recommendation written by a high school official. 

New Tampa PTAs/PTSAs Recognized

The Hillsborough County Council PTA/PTSA announced its award winners for the 2019-20 school year via Facebook Live on April 24, and New Tampa schools, especially Liberty Middle School and Hunter’s Green Elementary (HGE), fared well.

In fact, both were honored with awards for Principal of the Year.

Gaye Holt

HGE principal Gaye Holt was awarded Elementary Principal of the Year, while James Ammirati of Liberty took home the middle school honors.

Both schools also received awards for Family Involvement; Hunter’s Green Elementary for its lip synch battle called Panther Jamz, and Liberty for its Family Night event.

Liberty picked up eight other awards, including Middle School Instructional Person of the Year for teacher Toni Kuzmicki, PTSA President of the Year for Shari Burress, “a force to reckon with, as she powers her way through the school year taking on tasks and challenges and working harder than anyone else” according to her nomination.

At the high school level, both Wharton and Freedom received awards for their Volunteer Hours.

Wharton also received an award for Student Involvement and the county award for Advocacy/Legislation for the school’s Gay Straight Alliance.

The school’s success coach Roslyn Brown was awarded High School Non-Instructional Person of the Year.

Brown puts in long hours that do not stop when she leaves our school,” her nomination letter said. “She is always working to better the lives of our student population.”

Freedom won the award for Family Involvement for its Multicultural Festival — “Diversity at its Finest” —  and Alicia Newcomb, the school’s agriculture teacher, was named the High School Instructional Person of the Year.

According to her nomination, Newcomb created the school’s vet tech program, an agribusiness course, expanded the Future Farmers of America (FFA) program and helped students earn apprenticeships and certifications, while partnering with veterinarians and animal rescue organizations to provide students with hands-on experience.

High School Graduations

While graduations across the country have been cancelled altogether, Hillsborough County Public Schools has instead delayed graduations for the class of 2020 in the hopes that local and state guidelines will allow in-person graduation ceremonies in July. Dates have been set for July 13-22 at the Florida State Fairgrounds Expo Hall. 

A final decision about whether the graduations can be held will be made closer to the event date.

For now, Wharton’s graduation is scheduled for Friday, July 17, 12:30 p.m., while Freedom’s is scheduled for Saturday, July 18, 9 a.m.

New Tampa School Grades

*Every New Tampa school had the same grade for 2018-19 as it did the previous school year, with the exception of Hunter’s Green Elementary, which improved to a “B” grade after four straight years of “C” grades.

*New Tampa had six schools earn “A” grades, two that earned B grades and three earned C grades.

*Chiles Elementary was the only New Tampa school to score higher than 80 in English Language Arts (ELA), Math and Science Achievement. 

*Pride Elementary earned the best score among our schools for ELA Achievement (86), while Chiles was tops in Math (85) and Science (85).

*Chiles is now 17-for-17 in earning an A grade from the state.

*However, Benito Middle School, Pride and Clark elementaries all have the longest current streak of “A” grades — 18 straight years, dating back to 2002.

* Freedom and Wharton high schools were both “C” schools for the fourth straight year.

* Did you know that from 2008-10, every elementary and middle school in New Tampa earned A grades?