Today, guest speakers from across the country and around the world visited our Upper School campus to discuss their life experiences. Our Upper School students heard live performances and remarks from these guests, and spent some time in small group activities as well. 

Today's guest speakers included:
Hoover Alexander, restaurateur for over 30 years 
Rabbi Neil Blumofe, senior rabbi at Congregation Agudas Achim and accomplished saxophonist

Mat Hames, award-winning director and producer
Amal Kassir, slam poet and human rights activist

Geeti Mahajan, dancer/choreographer of Indian and Persian dance forms

National Academy of Performing Arts, organization promoting Pakistani cultural awareness

Deborah Toodle, producer and owner of Elevated Evolution, an Austin video production company   

We hope the day's discussions and activities will open dialogue at home as well; we'd love to hear your feedback! Contact Director of Diversity Kendall Evans to share your impressions. 

New St. Andrew's Website Now Live!

After months of anticipation, we've finally unveiled our new website! We hope you've had a chance to click around and explore the new design and structural elements, including responsive page design for a mobile-friendly user experience, expanding/collapsing text boxes to minimize scrolling, prominent news and calendar buttons to promote important events, and lots of photos of our scholars, artists, athletes, and servants in action! We're also excited to offer a robust Alumni page that provides many opportunities for our graduates to stay connected to St. Andrew's.

We'll continue to refine content and functionality as we receive feedback from our community. Keep in mind, what you see now is the website that anyone can see without logging in.

We are now tackling the portion of the website you will see after you log-in. Throughout the spring, we'll be creating a new system that teachers, students and parents will use to access assignments, grades, etc. These new features will be launched before the 2015-2016 school year begins. In the meantime, we will continue to have our previous log-in system in place to ensure continuity for the remainder of the school year.

If you have feedback on the new site, please contact Communications Manager Brooke Robertson,  Director of Development & Communications Catherine Herter, or Director of Technology Matt Lipstein.  

Good luck to our Upper School's Boys Basketball and Soccer, as well as Boys and Girls Swimming teams as they head to Houston to compete in their final tournament of the season! To find complete schedules visit the SPC website here.   

An internet radio broadcast of these games will be available via computer or with the use of a free mobile app courtesy of TSRN. To access the broadcasts via computer, go to http://tsrnsports.com/games/. (Use a Google Chrome browser for best results). To access via a mobile device, you can download the free mobile app for IOS, or the Android App from Google Play.   

The first Boys Soccer game is tonight at 6:00 pm, and the first Boys Basketball game is tonight at 6:30 pm. Go Cru!   

The Upper School will host about 500 Latin students from Austin's public and private middle and high schools on Friday, Feb. 20, and Saturday, Feb. 21.  Students will have the opportunity to interact with each other while competing in a variety of events, from written academic tests and spoken Latin recitations to costume and artistic competitions. Friday night kicks off with preliminary Certamen competitions in which school teams of up to four students will compete in a Quizbowl-style contest.  On Saturday there are a variety of events, culminating in the Certamen finals and the awards assembly.

We could use help from everyone in the St. Andrew's community to welcome visitors to our campus. A variety of volunteer jobs are open, including campus ambassadors to help direct our visitors. Interested parties can sign up here.

Congratulations to our Middle and Upper School Latin scholars, who were recently awarded medals for their outstanding work on the National Classical Etymology Exam. The exam assesses a student's ability to identify both Latin and Greek derivatives and their usage in the English language. Terms on the exam are mostly academic and SAT vocabulary words. These 27 medal winners competed with other students in their skill level from across the United States. Students in each skill level were eligible for gold, silver, or bronze medals. Congratulations to all our Latin students on such a strong performance! Go Cru! Click here to see the full list of winners. 

Gabe Lucio-Martin '17 (Choir, 1st year), Eric Simon (Choir, 1st year), Konstantin Nikolaidis '16 (Jazz Band, 2nd year), Read Barbee '16 (Choir, 3rd year), and Nate Stephenson '15 (Choir, 4th year), were chosen to perform at Texas State University with students from all over Texas. Nate Stephenson was honored as a four-year All-State participant-an honor that was held with only five other students out of the 160-voice choir! Upper School Choral Director Michael Rosensteel remarks, "It was a great weekend of wonderful music, performed by extremely talented and passionate young musicians!" 

Language Arts teacher Grace Ortman and seven sixth-grade students have embarked on an ambitious and exciting journey with their new Literary Magazine Club. Grace will guide her students through the planning and creation of two literary magazines this year. After visiting with these students during their Club meeting, it's clear they will bring a variety of talents and plenty of energy to these projects!

When we visited the Club, students were gleefully re-arranging snippets of words into various phrases to create brief poems. After reading their spontaneous poems aloud, they immediately scrambled to come-up with new poems. Grace remarked that the exercise is especially helpful for students who are confronted with a daunting, blank page: "Sometimes you get overwhelmed by all the words in the English language, and you don't know where to begin. This activity is also helpful when you get writer's block."  

This exercise serves another purpose as well, as Grace notes, "We'll do this on a larger scale when we start laying out the magazine. We'll lay all the pages out on the tables--much like the words are laid out right now--and the students will need to arrange and re-arrange the pages to decide what sort of flow the magazine should have." Grace will be an excellent guide for her students during the creative writing and publication processes; she's written for and co-produced many literary magazines throughout her college and post-graduate studies, and holds an MFA in Poetry.  

The Literary Club students agree they chose this club because they "like being creative, like writing, and like our teacher." Their taste in authors is more varied though; they name favorites JK Rowling, Sharon Creech, John Green, and vintage Stephen King! With this much enthusiasm and creative interest, these students will produce some great work for us!