Please congratulate the following students who will be serving as student government leaders for 2023-24!! Elections will be held in the fall for rising 9th graders.

Class of 2024 

Class President - Maggie Mello

Vice President - Sophia Nisimblat

Secretary - Skye Cully

Treasurer - Lila Beckwith

Class Advisors - Jennifer Stainton and Sherry Sousa

Student Council Members - Mac Abrams, Tess Belisle, Logan Knox, Leah Kuhnert, Ella Stainton and Farren Stainton

Class of 2025 

Class President - Jane Stout

Vice President - Quinn Uva

Secretary - Bizzy Tindall

Treasurer - Jack Quicker

Class Advisors - Betsie O’Neill 

Student Council Members - Izzy Cellini, Owen Courcey, Graham Fox, Aubrey Semen, and Joey Sluka 

Class of 2026 

Class President - Finn Costello

Vice President - Sadie Boulbol

Secretary - Aleks Cirovic

Treasurer - Kaitlyn Burres

Class Advisors - Janis Boulbol and Sarah Hagge

Student Council Members - Milo Farrington, Anna Fink, Schuyler Hagge, Maya Sluka, and Max van der Schoot

Martha Perkins is the recipient of the 2023 James T. McLaughlin Co-Curricular Award for her work as the Cross-Country coach and the organizer of the Poetry Out Loud competition at WUHS.

On her coaching, Assistant Cross-Country Coach Abbie Castriotta said, “Martha cultivates a love of the sport so that it can become a life-long endeavor. She brings her athletes together in a way I can say firsthand, I have never seen before.”

Regarding her work organizing the Poetry Out Loud competition, School Librarian Susan Piccoli said, “She not only coaches students on how to run cross-country, but how to run their lines of poetry. Martha Perkins's work as the cross-country coach and the organizer of the Poetry Out Loud competitions embodies the meaning of the James T. McLaughlin co-curricular award. She does all of these things outside of the classroom in addition to her work as a dedicated teacher in the classroom.”

And, Danny Smith ’23 added, “I could not have asked for a better English teacher and cross country coach.”

Student Council, advised by Marie Anderson and Peggy Boylan, voted to honor Ms. Perkins with this recognition and Jim McLaughlin attended the last Best Day to present the award to Martha Perkins.

This year Advanced Art & AP Art have worked closely with Vera Sheehan, an Abenaki artist, educator, and member of the Vermont Abenaki Artists Association. The students spent time in conversation with her, learning about the Abenaki culture as well as how Abenaki people are connected to the ash tree and affected by the presence of the emerald ash borer. The beautiful artwork they designed and created is in response to these conversations. Their work will be displayed in the education barn at St Gauden's National Historical Park in Cornish, NH, through July.

Congratulations to these student artists: Lindsey Bacon, Annie Hauze, Daphne McDermott, Myra McNaughton, Delia Morgan, Dillon Moss, Kiara Nestler, Charlotte Nunan, Jacob Stone, Logan Sudol, Allie Tarleton, Kyra Tartleton, Joseph Tsouknakis, Ariana Winawer-Stein, Kamron Yuengling.

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As artificial Intelligence becomes a routine presence in our lives, 8th grade English students have begun investigating how AI creates and sorts natural human language. Students began by looking at artificial intelligence broadly, and took a homemade Turing Test to see whether they could tell the difference between human and AI artists, musicians, and writers. Then we took a deep dive into StoryQ, an AI text classification model that took us behind the scenes to see how a machine "reads" human text, identifies key words, and assigns them negative or positive weights to make predictions about the overall sentiment, or tone.

Students fed StoryQ ice cream reviews, then analyzed the words the machine used to make its predictions about sentiment. Some of the machine's decisions surprised us. For instance, it assigned a heavy negative weight to "like" and "just," which were sometimes used positively. It was also flummoxed by sarcasm :). At first, StoryQ was only able to predict 78% of reviews accurately, so we analyzed error cases and proposed new language rules to improve the model.

Once we understood more about how AI generates and classifies text, we turned our attention to its limitations and its role in our lives. We looked at news stories and discussed whether AI is sentient, and whether it will ultimately improve or worsen human communication, and human life. Students raised concerns from disinformation to job loss. Below is an AI-generated image of 8th graders having a fishbowl-style discussion, courtesy of DALLE-2, and an actual image of our class doing the same thing.

A group of students presented with Jennifer Stainton and Audrey Richardson at the Vermont Superintendent Association conference last Friday. They presented on Unity and Freedom: District Equity work through student voice.

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On Tuesday, May 24 our culminating events for our The Most Costly Journey took place in the library, classrooms and outdoors. The day began with The Villalobos Brothers visiting Maestra Megyesi's middle school Spanish class. The Villalobos Brothers told the students about their own journey from Mexico to the United States, how they studied music and the arts as kids and how those experiences shaped their careers as professional musicians today. Students asked them a lot of questions in Spanish about their instruments, their style of music and their favorite foods.

The next workshop middle school art students participated in was with Marek Bennett, cartoonist and one of the editors of The Most Costly Journey. Marek explained his process and taught the students in Ms. Jimerson and Ms. Piana's classes how to make their own comic books.

The main event was the concert by the Villalobos Brothers outside in the bowl behind the school. The brothers' exquisite musicianship, high-powered fiddling and moving vocals got the crowd clapping, dancing and singing along. In between songs, they engaged with the audience and shared that "This is the coolest high school auditorium we've ever played." The band also shared that they feel a strong connection to Vermont because of the similarities with their home state, Vera Cruz in Mexico.

After they finished performing, they opened it up to questions. Ruth Stallard, eighth grader, asked what their favorite thing about Vermont is and one of the brothers responded, "the people." Mimi Konda-Olmstead, ninth grader, asked where they get their inspiration from and one of the brothers said, "Travel. You should do it. You get fresh ideas and your imagination is reawakened." A number of Senora Bristow's fifth grade Hartford elementary Spanish students had the opportunity to ask the band questions and one student asked about their favorite musical collaborations. One of the brothers shared that he did a recent collaboration with Bruce Springsteen on a song called "Stones." One of the other brothers said the Chieftains and a third brother said his favorite collaboration was with "elder musicians from Mexico."

Their joy of performing and educating was evident throughout the concert. Hannah Gubbins, junior, described their music as “upbeat” and appreciated that “they taught us about what they were singing about.” After the concert concluded there were more classroom visits to Mr. Trudeau's high school band class and another cartooning workshop with students in Mrs. Hagge's high school English class.

Thanks so much to BarnArts, Pentangle and the Vermont Humanities Council for making this concert and programming possible. Thank you to the Villalobos Brothers and Marek Bennett for visiting our school. Thank you to everyone at WUHSMS who helped with this event. And, thank you to all of the teachers who incorporated The Most Costly Journey into their classes and to all of the students who read the book and participated in the Vermont Reads program.

The first official year for the CRAFT program is wrapping up! Current and rising CRAFT students gathered at Springbrook Farm in Reading to tour the cheese making operation and dairy barns. We also reflected on the first year of classes and experiences and set some good structures and excitement in place for the 23-24 school year. For a closing reflection, students completed this phrase: "CRAFT IS" with: hands-on, community, helps you get outside, fun, an adventure, a lot of trees, community building, creative, gardening, fun, cool, awesome, amazing, great, exciting, building resilient systems, not boring, creativity, our future, growing and eating a lot of good food, learning, an experience, outdoorsy, interesting, and crucial for our future. Couldn't say it better!

The MAC Language department at Woodstock Union High School honored inductees into two national World Language organizations on Friday, May 19, 2023. The ceremony was held in the Rhoda Teagle Library. Membership in the Sociedad Honoraria Hispánica for Spanish and Société Honoraire de Français for French requires academic commitment and excellence and demonstrated service in promoting the language and culture.

Woodstock Union High School’s chapter of the Société Honoraire de Français inducted the following students: Anna Brown, Ethan Dean, Lily Gubbins, Annie Hauze, Alec Smail, Rowan Smail, Forrest Yeager, Phoebe Anderson, Jaedon Beardsley, Tess Belisle, Hannah Gubbins, Leah Kuhnert, Chloe Masillo, Grace Modari. Delia Morgan, Griffin Piconi, Clara Shortle, Seqouia Barbour, Izzy Cellini, Lucy Drebitko, Graham Farrington, Olivia Grasso, Levi Halley, Joffre Leyagada, Ada Mahood, Eryn McGuire, Caeden Perreault, Quinn Uva, Kaitlyn Burress, Anna Fink, Schuyler Hagge, Joaquin Jones-Walker, Maggie Pierce, Priscilla Richardson, Elizabeth Tindall, Max Van der Schoot, Beck Welch and Mia Zillian.

Woodstock Union High School’s chapter of the Sociedad Honoraria Hispánica inducted the following students: Sam Leggett, Dillon Moss, Ariana Winawer-Stein, Phoebe Goldberg, Skye Cully, Aubrey Seman, Joey Sluka, Maya Sluka, Jane Stout, Ella Stainton, Farren Stainton, Aidan Keough-Vella, Sophia Rosenbach, Amélie Fabre and Brooke Hecker.

We are truly proud to recognize the achievements of this group of students.

Woodstock Union High School's Vermont Teen Leadership Safety Program (VTLSP) students did their Project Sticker Shock Campaign in area convenience stores the week before prom and graduation.

This campaign addresses underage drinking and aims to reach those individuals ages 21 and over who legally purchase alcohol and provide it to minors. The youth-designed stickers are adhered to multi-packs of beer, alco-pops, and other appropriate alcoholic beverages. The students of VTLSP specifically plans this campaign to occur before prom and graduation, a very important time in students' lives that is extremely exciting and momentous with hopes it will be filled with good, safe, choices. The VTLSP team of students and advisor wish to thank Maplefields, Cumberland Farms, and Mac's Market for allowing us the opportunity to do this campaign in their stores. Pictured are: Eleanor Williams, Aleksandra Cirovic, and Mimi Kanda-Olmstead.