GPS District Digest (v6, i16)

Welcome back from Spring Recess! We left in the winter and came back in the spring. Now it is time for the stretch run.

It is award season at Greenwich Public Schools. This past week, we held an amazing ceremony for the Community Service Awards at the PAC. The honorees on stage were so inspiring and you could feel the pride beaming from their families in the audience. The GHS Jazz Ensemble? Worth the price of admission! If you know Dr. Ernie Fleishman, you love Dr. Ernie Fleishman, regardless of his baseball fandom choices. Were you there? Tell us what you think!

The Distinguished Teachers Award ceremony is scheduled for Thursday, May 8, 4:30 PM, at Central Middle School. Will you be there?

Enjoy Issue No. 16 and thank you for your support.

GPS District Digest

The Distinguished Teachers Awards Committee (DTAC) has named Greenwich Public Schools’ 2025 Distinguished Teachers.

• Frances Bittman, Greenwich High School, English & AVID

• Robin Chenot, North Mianus School, Music

• Bethany Fuscaldo, Greenwich High School, Music

• Julia Haas-Godsil, Glenville School, Math Interventionist

• Ralph Marmor, Western Middle School, English

• Dr. Beena Ramachandran, Greenwich High School, Chemistry

“The Distinguished Teacher Awards Committee received so many outstanding nominations this year,” DTAC Co-Chairs Ms. Linda Shirley and Ms. Judy Soto collectively said. “It is an affirmation of the amazing, talented and dedicated teachers that comprise the Greenwich Public School system. We are indeed fortunate to live in an area that values education and strives to provide the best teachers for our students and community.”

Were you at the Community Service Awards ceremony at the PAC?

Since 1986, students are annually selected from each elementary school to accept the award on behalf of the entire school for service activities and projects that they have participated in throughout the year. Community Service Awards are presented to middle school students, representing each of GPS’ three middle schools and five high school students, representing each GHS house. An additional high school student is also selected to receive the Fleishman Service Award. Dr. Ernest Fleishman, a former Greenwich Superintendent of Schools and the Community Service Awards founder, presents this award to a GHS student who has made significant contributions to their school and community.

Elementary School Representatives

In the sports world, a dynasty is achieved after its third championship. That is exactly what we are experiencing with the Greenwich High School Chess Club.

Recently, the Chess Club, with support of Club Advisor Mr. Adrian Ramirez, brought home the Connecticut States championship trophy for the third consecutive year. Additionally, the team made it to the semifinals of the Fairfield Interscholastic Chess League after recording a 10-1 regular season.

Are we thinking four-peat?

Earlier this month, Western Middle School held its annual Career Day, with more than 60 parents, staff and community members sharing their knowledge and inspiring students. This special day supports the AVID college and career readiness framework, which is a big focus as an AVID school and the hope is they inspired students to pursue a career they have shown interest in or one they may not have even known about.

Students selected the career presentations they wanted to view during each session; this was followed by Career Day reflections and the creation of a Career Day AVID one-pager based on their notes. AVID School Coordinator Ms. Kim Matarese planned the day.

A wide range of careers was represented, including:

• Spy Satellites and National Intelligence
• Medicine/Neuroscience
• Dog Therapy Handler/Evaluator
• Film Producer
• Media for Major League Soccer
• National Football League former player and analyst

For more photos, head to WMS' webpage featuring a slideshow from this great event.

The Food Services Department brought excitement to April Fools’ Day by serving breakfast all day, giving students a fun twist on their usual lunch.

The team joined in the celebration by dressing up in pajamas and funky outfits, adding a splash of color and creativity to the cafeterias.

To make things even more exciting, they held a friendly competition among schools to see who could bring the most April Fools spirit. The energy was high, the laughter was contagious, and the day was a huge success.

Greenwich High School is hosting its third annual GHS International Night on Thursday, May 1 from 6:00-8:00 PM in the student center. International Night is a celebration of the diverse cultures that Greenwich has to offer, and will include performances, activities, and food. All are welcome and if you are interested in making this event even more special, consider signing up to bring food to share your culture.

Last year's International Night was a great success with more than 300 attendees and they are hoping for even more this year.

The fifth graders from Old Greenwich School recently traveled to the City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia, to continue their studies of the beginnings of our nation.

Stops included Independence Hall, the Museum of the American Revolution, and the Franklin Institute.

Greenwich High School seniors are giving back to their elementary and middle schools as teacher assistants in the classrooms this spring through the senior internship program.

Greenwich High School, in partnership with the Town of Greenwich, began the Internship Program in 1997. Twenty-three senior interns were placed in jobs throughout town offices for the last month of the school year. Since then, many companies and organizations have joined us to help students experience the world of work before they begin their post-high school plans.

This year, 612 seniors will begin their internships in May. More than a hundred of these students will be interning across our elementary and middle schools. The College and Career Center at Greenwich High School coordinates the internship program and many teachers at GHS volunteer their time to serve as faculty mentors.

Seniors in good academic standing and meeting behavioral and attendance standards are allowed to participate each spring.

How did you celebrate Mismatched Day earlier this month? By wearing mismatched socks, of course!

You did it to honor Western Middle School eighth grader, Sam Buck, who suffers from a very rare, genetic brain disease called vanishing white matter disease. For those that know him, he starts every day with a huge smile on his face and mismatched socks on his feet.

Mismatched Day is an event that the folks at Western Middle School are very passionate about. What they achieved this year was beyond all expectations. They raised more than $4,000 as a community, which is triple what they raised last year.

WMS teacher, Mr. Cody Ludvinsky, spearheaded this fundraiser and event and got the word out to the whole country, which resulted in donations of hundreds of hand-made socks that they were able to sell.

Ms. Alisha Barry and Ms. Audrey Jankiewicz, two staff members very skilled at knitting, also helped Mr. Ludvinsky get the word out by attending knitting events in the area to get more supporters.

Greenwich HS freshman Raghav Ramji’s original research, Inductive Linguistic Reasoning with Large Language Models, was accepted for presentation at the 38th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), one of the world’s most prestigious international conferences on artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The December 2024 conference was the largest annual gathering of professional machine learning and computational neuroscience researchers in the world, and Raghav was one of the few high schoolers whose work was accepted to present to professors, industry researchers, graduate students and more through the poster session.

Raghav also presented his research at the New England NLP Symposium at Yale University earlier this month.

For the first time in recorded GPS history, all three middle schools recently sent teams to the Regional Science Bowl Competition, hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy in Glastonbury.

Nearly 60 students from the Central, Eastern, and Western Middle School science bowl teams were supported this year by a generous grant from the Greenwich Alliance for Education, which funded equipment, study materials, scrimmages, and bus transportation to the competition.

Additionally, the members of the Greenwich HS science team served as mentors and hosted practice scrimmages at GHS to help the middle schoolers prepare for regionals.

Congratulations to the Central MS science team for placing fourth overall and Eastern MS' two teams for placing seventh and eighth. The two Western MS teams just missed qualifying, but WMS “A” regrouped for a fourth place finish in the Wildcard Round.

All interested students are invited to join the middle school science bowl teams, and we cannot wait to hear more success stories from them in the future.

Earlier this month, Glenville School students showcased their ingenuity and determination at the school’s first-ever STEM Fair.

Some were eager to experiment, while others were excited to build. Curiosity and creativity brought forth a wide range of projects from students K-5.

Young scientists created their own tornado, generated wind indoors, and formulated unicorn toothpaste. Young engineers built a walking robot, a water rocket, a solar oven, and so much more. Some students chose to educate on important topics, such as how do we reduce our use of plastic.

Their projects culminated in fantastic presentations which were well-received by the many visitors.

Did you see a familiar face in last month's issue of Publisher's Weekly?

Us too! Of course, that was Western MS' library media specialist, Ms. Pia Ledina, featured in the article titled, "Reading Across the Curriculum: Three Educators Tie Reading into Multiple Subjects."

Reporter Patricia J. Murphy spoke to three educators who are committed to integrating reading across the curriculum to elevate literacy and readers in their classrooms and libraries, including Ms. Ledina.

“We’ve made a concentrated effort at our middle school to help kids identify areas of interest that they might like to read about,” Ledina told Publisher's Weekly. “If kids never learn to love reading, it’s never going to be important to them—and they’ll never appreciate how it can, and will, take them everywhere.”

Publishers Weekly, now celebrating its 150th anniversary, is considered “the bible of the book business.” Focused on the international book publishing business, it is now a multimedia news platform with full horizontal coverage of book publishing beginning with the author-as-creator to publisher, printer, and distributor to the end consumer.

Earlier this month, Eastern Middle School's sixth graders welcomed local residents Stacey Delikat, Hilary Daniels, Randi Jachino, and Dillon Horowitz, all grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, into their social studies classes.

As members of 3GNY, an educational non-profit organization founded by grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, these four presenters have been trained to speak to and teach audiences about the Holocaust using their family’s stories. Through their personal stories, they made connections between historical events and issues of intolerance and persecution that remain with us today.

The presentation was made possible through generous donations to the PTA, which make enriching programs like this possible.

EXPLR, a streaming video and curriculum service, recently announced that 106 students whose outstanding performance in the National STEM Challenge earned them the title of National STEM Champions. Among those champions was our own, GHS freshman Tyler Malkin.

Each National STEM Champion and a family member received an expense-paid trip to attend the Festival in Washington, D.C., and showcased their projects to the public and top business and government leaders. In addition, each National STEM Champion received free access to EXPLR’s educational streaming video and curriculum platform.

The National STEM Festival invited students in grades 7-12 from across the U.S. and its territories to conceive and submit STEM innovations, inventions, and research across six categories: Aerospace Innovation, Environmental Stewardship, Future Food, Health and Medicine, Powering the Planet, and Tech for Good.

Tyler’s research improves global health through his development of a rapid, low-cost diagnostic test for detecting iodine deficiency, creating an accessible tool for the two billion people affected by iodine deficiency worldwide. In addition to being selected as a National STEM Champion, Tyler is also the recipient of the National STEM Festival Alumni Award. This award honors an individual who inspires others through innovative solutions, leadership qualities, and commitment to using STEM for the greater good.

Greenwich students continue to impress on the local and national level at various science fairs:

2025 Junior Science and Humanities Symposium

Oral Presenters

Lula Wang: Lipid-based Codelivery of Doxorubicin and siRNA PD-L1, as a Multi-function Chemo-immunotherapy, Selective to PDAC via its MUC1 Overexpression (first place and will compete in the National JSHS)

Marley Wies: Extraction of Cellulose Nanocrystals via Sulfuric Acid Hydrolysis from Post-Consumer Cotton-Elastane Textile Blends with Elastane Recovery

Poster Presenters

Henry Jin: Novel Autonomous Drone Control Framework utilizing Deep Reinforcement Learning

Tyler Malkin: Development of a Simple Salivary Rapid Diagnostic for the Detection of Iodine Deficiency (first place and will compete in the National JSHS)

For a full summary, head to the University Connecticut’s webpage.

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2025 CT Science and Engineering Fair

Lula Wang: Lipid-Based Codelivery of Doxorubicin and siRNA PD-L1, as a Multi-function Chemo-immunotherapy, Selective to PDAC via its MUC1 Overexpression

• Pepsico Engineering Awards - 1st Place- Engineering Senior High, $300 & plaque and trip to ISEF

• Alexion Biotechnology Awards - 1st Place Biotechnology Senior High, $300 & plaque and trip to ISEF

Arnav Bhatia: Real-Time Diagnosis and Alert of Computer Vision Syndrome, to Promote Healthy Screen-Time Habits

• Infosys Foundation Computer Science Awards - 1st Place High School - $300, Plaque

Hannah Dcruz: Targeted Delivery of a Melittin Anti-inflammatory Peptide via a Eudragit-Coated Sporopollenin Exine Capsule, for Effective Treatment of Crohn’s Disease

• Pepsico Engineering Awards - 2nd Place in Engineering Senior High- $200 & plaque

• Keen-Yin Woo (3011): A Novel Multi-Modal ML Approach for Early Detection of Alzheimer's Disease Using Clinical, Genetic, and MRI Modalities

• Connecticut Science Fair Association Life Science Awards with The Jackson Laboratory - 3rd Place- Life Sciences Senior High, $100 & Plaque

• Pfizer Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Awards - 2nd Place High School - $200, Plaque

Monty (Isaac) Bell: Development of Hybrid Servo-Pnuematic Lower-Body Exoskeleton for use as a Mobility Assistance Device

• Connecticut Science Fair Association Physical Science Awards - 5th Place- Physical Sciences Senior High Individual, Plaque

• Alexion Biotechnology Awards - 3rd Place Biotechnology Senior High, $100 & plaque

Ryan Wadhwa: Leveraging of Neural Network Design to Create High-Accuracy, Low-Latency Detection of Real-time

• Infosys Foundation Computer Science Awards - 3rd Place High School, $100 & Plaque

Neil Pendkar: Fabrication of an Antibiotic Gelatin Hydrogel Delivery Mechanism for Atopic or Injectable Release of mRNA Vaccines

• Alexion Biotechnology Awards - 4th Place Biotechnology Senior High, plaque

Isha Bharti: Neural Network Interpretation of EEG Scans for Accurate Diagnosis of Asymptomatic Concussions

William Dozier: Prediction of Low-Pressure Metallization of Metal Hydrides by Ab Initio Simulation

Rachel Goldenberg: Restoration of Sleep Cycle and Activity Interruption of Alzheimer’s Rivastigmine Treatment with the Addition of Labetalol

Nishant Jain: Facilitated Ethylene Absorption and Freshness Preservation via All-Natural Composite-Coated Stickers

Henry Jin: Development of a Novel Deep Reinforcement Learning Algorithm for Decentralized Real-Time Control of Autonomous Drones with Hardware-Independent Compatibility

Raymond Li: Generating Novel Protein Sequences with Specialized Functions using LoRA-Finetuning

Rex Lu: Design of a Biometric Trap for Spotted Lanternflies, Using Scent-Profiles of Ailanthus altissima

Iri Pullepu: Consideration of Location-specific Weather and Topographic Datasets to Model Efficient Deployment of Forest Fire Flame Retardants

Colin Reynolds: Comparative Growth Analysis of Mycelium in Standard vs. Orange Peel-Enriched Substrates for Production of a Biodegradable Foam as a Polystyrene Substitute

Marley Wies: Extraction of Cellulose Nanocrystals via Sulfuric Acid Hydrolysis from Post-Consumer Cotton-Elastane Textile Blends with Elastane Recovery

Sophie Yu: Development of nnU-Net model for pediatric brain tumor segmentation in multi-modality MRI images

Visit the CSEF Virtual Project Portal online.

We love hearing from our friends over at the Bruce Museum. They have more programs for your entire family than the Boss has hit songs:

• Science Solver: Sculptures (April 26-27)
• Bruce Beginnings: Friendly Fish (April 29-30)
• Bruce Beginnings Junior: Friendly Fish (April 30)
• Science Solvers: Spring Pollinators (May 3-4)
• Afternoon of Wellness: Connect, Explore and Experience – Linking Art and Music (April 29)
• Bruce Socials: Poetry Circle (April 29)
• Bruce Experiences: Music at the Bruce with Carolyn Enger (May 1)
• Meet for Coffee at the Bruce: Conversations with Robert Kalman (May 3)

For more information, head to their website, where art meets science. See ya at the Bruce!

Social media, when done responsibly, can be a great tool to share information. Here at GPS, we use social media to give you a behind the scenes look at what is happening in our buildings, celebrate staff and student achievement, and to break news.

Are you one of our 2,165 followers on X (formerly known as Twitter)? If not, why aren't you? We know the world can be a very mean and nasty place and it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. But here, it's all sunshine and rainbows.

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