Career Technology Instruction Spring Leadership Conference

Seven students from Alpharetta High School attended the annual Career Technology Instruction Spring Leadership Conference at Rock Eagle 4-H Camp in Eatonton, GA. Bringing home first places in the state were Hannah Frazier for Culinary and Cydni Turner for her Career Exploration Manual and Job Interview.  Hannah had created a Croquembouche, a French wedding cake made of over 100 cream puffs and decorated with confectioner’s sugar and roses.  She also completed a notebook documenting the skills involved and showing the steps she took to make the Croquembouche. Cydni Turner researched the career of a veterinarian and displayed her work in a notebook.  This information covered the education required, schools offering that major, the skills and responsibilities of the job, and possible future outlook and salaries.  At the competition she participated in a job interview.  Also competing were Katharine Bagley in Catering with a Coca-Cola theme and Shawn Wright, David Samuel, and Daniel Hernandez in Occupational Creative Thinking.

AHS Students Cooking for Volunteer Lunch

Mrs. Flowers and Mrs. Wright's Class Presentations

Mrs. Flowers and Mrs. Wright's students have created campaigns for a change that they want to see happen within the school, county, state, country or globe.  They are being displayed in the library, and everyone is invited to view.

College Football Signings in the Media Center

Nesean Crofford: Syracuse University

Front row left to right: Sandi Crofford (mother), Nesean Crofford, Colton Crofford (brother)

Back row: Mike Scheifflee (Athletic Director), Nick Malantis (assistant coach), Jacob Nichols (Head coach), Tracy High (assistant coach), Shannon Kersey (Principal)

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Nick Torrace: Centre College

Front row left to right: Lisa Torrance (mother), Nick Torrance, Kasandra Torrance (sister)Back row: Mike Scheifflee (athletic director), Nick Malantis (assistant coach), Jacob Nichols (head coach), Thed Torrance (father), Tracy High (assistant coach), Shannon Kersey (AHS principal)

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Malua Young: Colorado School of Mines

Front row left to right: Michelle Young (mother), Malua,  Fa'atui (sister)

Back row: Mike Scheifflee (Athletic Director), Nick Malantis (assistant coach), Jacob Nichols (Head Coach), Malua Young, Sr. (father), Tracy High (assistant coach), Shannon Kersey (Principal)

2015 Georgia High School Musical Theatre Awards

Congratulations to Ms. Michelle Austin for winning the Schuler Orchestra Award at the 2015 Georgia High School Musical Theatre Awards!

AHS Pep Rally!

AHS Poetry Cafe

AHS Men's Lacrosse Visits with injured player Jack Enright

On April 19, 2015, several members from the Alpharetta High School Raiders Men’s Varsity Lacrosse program visited with injured lacrosse player, Jack Enright from Chapin High School in South Carolina.  Jack suffered a severe spinal cord injury on March 4 - early in the spring 2015 lacrosse season - and is currently being treated at the Shepherd Center for Spinal & Brain Rehabilitation in Atlanta, GA.  Alpharetta High School Seniors and Varsity team members, Clay Batley (#9), Jimmy Podsiadlo (#10), and Cal Swanson (#22) presented Jack and his family with an assortment of AHS lacrosse gear, as well as various gift cards and a check for $1,500 to help aid in the Enright family’s medical and lodging expenses while Jack undergoes treatment in Atlanta. 

Sarah Liu awarded MKW Scholarship

Congratulations to Sarah Liu for being awarded the Martha Stewart Bulloch chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution Marcheta Knight Weitz Scholarship. 

Rotary Teacher & Student of the Quarter

Congratulations to Lori Holland and Nicole Ross for being awarded the Rotary Teacher and Student of the Quarter for service hours.

Alpharetta, Milton High Schools Nominated For Shuler Awards

The Shuler Hensley Awards For Excellence in High School Musical Theatre showcase the next generation of Georgia's musical theatre talent.  The awards, fashioned after Broadway's Tony Awards, celebrates excellence in high school musical theatre.  They will be held on Thursday, April 23rd and include a red carpet event.  The following local schools were nominated and recognized with honorable mentions: Alpharetta High School ("The Drowsy Chaperone"), Chattahoochee High School ("Little Shop of Horrors"), Johns Creek High School ("Footloose"), and Milton High School ("Marry Poppins").  Tickets are now $22 and can be purchased through ticket master.
The full story can be read at: http://patch.com/georgia/alpharetta/alpharetta-milton-high-schools-nominated-shuler-awards

AHS Drowsy Chaperone nominated for Shulers

Alpharetta High’s spring musical , The Drowsy Chaperone will be competing in the 2015 Shuler Hensley Awards for Excellence in High School Musicals.  Our production of was nominated for four awards, including,  Best Orchestra, Best Technical Design, Best Supporting Actor – Tate Rehklau, and Best Showstopper.  Additionally, The Drowsy Chaperone was cited with Honorable mention for Over Musical Production of the Year, Director of a Musical – David Gay, Best Musical Direction – Michelle Austin, and Best Actor – Conner Kocks.  The award ceremony will be present at the Cobb Energy Center on April 22nd, at 7:30pm and will be televised on WSB-TV.

YMCA Pep Rally

AHS' drum line performed at the Y on Monday. They were an important part for the YMCA's Pep Rally for their Why It Matters Annual Giving Campaign.  The students did an amazing job and the members were so impressed!  

Joshua Seides in the News

Josh Seides, a junior at Alpharetta High School, started the nonprofit Technocademy (www.technocademy.org) in his freshman year of high school. It has helped more than 150,000 seniors and veterans learn technology and has been featured in outlets like US News & World Report and Yahoo!. Josh is also working on developing a new program--CodeKids--which will provide instruction on programming and video production to elementary and middle school students.

Alpharetta's Senior Games!

Senior Games 2015 at AHS!

Alpha Speech Team

Six Alpha Speech Team students will compete for the national championship in June in Dallas, Texas at the National Speech and Debate Championship.  Christina Nguyen and Lara Strydom will both compete in humorous interpretation. The teams of Nalah Hill and Milx Barbosa and Kelly Lumpkin and Tate Rehklau will compete in duo interpretation  What a nice finale to a truly terrific speech season.

Science Fair Winners

The Georgia Science and Engineering Fair was held in Athens March 27th-28th. Eric Kim and Hithardhi Duggireddy won second place in their category and Shubhhom Bhattacharya won first place in his category. Congratulations to these students on a job well done!

2015 Kids Who Care Awards

Josh Seides, a junior at Alpharetta High School, was one of five kids awarded the 11Alive Kids who Care Award.  Each recipient will receive a $1,100 scholarship from 11Alive, The Junior League of Atlanta and Arby's Foundation and will be recognized during the 11Alive Community Service Awards and at the spring membership meeting of The Junior League of Atlanta. Josh founded Technocademy, a non-profit organization teaching senior citizens and veterans about the tools of modern technology, vital in modern social interaction. The training includes one on one lessons, tutorials, Tips of the Week and Operation T-CUP, an effort to reach seniors and veterans nationwide in partnership with local United Way chapters.

2015 State Leadership Meeting

The AHS Chapter of the FCCLA (Family, Career, and Community Leaders of America) club had a very successful trip to the 2015 State Leadership Meeting in Athens, GA. 8 students competed, all were ranked in the top 10 of their competitive event, 6 placed either 1st 2nd or 3rd and 4 students qualified for National Competition in July in Washington, D.C. Alpharetta also won the themed banner challenge for the conference.

Arman Quereshi & Kristin Smith GOLD - National Qualifier-  Star Event- Advocacy- NO KID HUNGRY-

Jiabin Du-  SILVER- National Qualifier- Star Event:  Applied Math for Culinary- Cost Control through Conversions

Destiny Storey-  Third Place- National Qualifier- State Event: Knife Skills

Nate Patino- GOLD- Star Event:  Recycle & Redesign-

Evan Schmitz SILVER- Star Event:  Sports Nutrition


Congratulations AHS FCCLA!

FBLA Take Top Honors at the State Leadership Conference!

Competing at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Atlanta over March 20^th & 21^st, Alpharetta FBLA members took home twelve 1^st place awards including the prestigious Sweepstakes Award presented to the High School with the most competition event wins. It was the third year in a row that Alpharetta won the award. FBLA is the largest nationwide high school organization whose mission is to bring business and education together in a positive working relationship through innovative leadership and career development programs. AHS students competed in over 30 events with 67 qualifying for the National Leadership Conference in Chicago this summer which is a Georgia FBLA record. Events range from public speaking events, technical pre-submission events such as computer programming, and on-line testing events like Accounting, Business Law and Securities and Investments. FBLA is the largest student organization at Alpharetta High School with over 300 members this school year.

Eagle Scout

Spencer Jones has attained the rank of Eagle Scout, Boy Scout of America highest award.  Congratulations Spencer!

All-Star Basketball Classic Weekend

Saturday night was all about the Girls’ and Boys’ Senior All-Star Games. All-Star players were from public and private schools in the North Atlanta area.  The Senior Boys’ All-Star game followed with a tough competition. The game resulted in a South Team win with a final score of 81 – 56 over the North Team. Congratulations to Jaylon Gamble, the 2015 player of the Game for the boys’ game. He not only won player of the game, but also on Friday night won the Slam Dunk Contest.

All-Star Basketball Classic Weekend

The 2015 Senior All-Star Basketball Classic was March 13^th and 14^th at Lambert High School in Cumming, GA. The Friday night Skills Competition was a fun way to kick-off the weekend, allowing players to show off their best Slam Dunks, 3-Point shots, Obstacle Course skills, and Co-Ed team shots. Alpharetta wants to congratulate Roy Winston who was the winner of the skills challenge obstacle course.

AHS Staff Spring Fever

March 23rd was "Wear a fake mustache day!"

Kindle Anderson to serve on the State Superintendent's Advisory Board

Kindle Anderson is one of 62 students throughout the state to be selected to serve on the State Superintendent's Advisory Board. Kindle was one of 3 students to be nominated to run for the position of Student State Governor, and won the election with 48% of the vote. His role includes working with Governor Deal, Superintendent Woods, as well as the rest of the Student Advisory Board to help reform education by providing solutions and new ideas to benefit students in every corner of the state. Under Kindle's leadership, 5 bills of the Georgia House of Representatives are currently being rewritten and revised by the advisory board in order to suit the needs of the students.

State Reflections Winners

Alpharetta High School has much to be proud of and we can add to it by sharing that we have 3 State Reflections winners this year, more than any other North Fulton High School!!  All have been invited to celebrate their accomplishments in a special ceremony held at the High Museum.

A special congratulations goes out to the following students:

Nicholas Felder, 12th grade / Music Category

Jun Ng, 11th grade / Film Category

Tanuja Anne, 10th grade / Photography Category

STEM Emory research fellow visit

As part of Emory’s STEM program: Imagining the Future, Alpharetta has a guest speaker, JP Canner, presenting to all the H HAP and AP bio classes on Wednesday, March 18th. 

Doctor Canner has a PhD in Cellular, Molecular, and Developmental Biology. He is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Emory working on skeletal muscle repair and regeneration.  Emory offers similar programs each year, matching post doctorate fellows with Atlanta area schools. One of their goals is to bring actual research scientists together with students (future scientists) to talk to them about what biological research is really like, the path they took to get where they are today, and, of course, content.

Congratulations to the 2015 Governors Honors Finalists!

Congratulations to the 2015 Governors Honors Finalists! 

Last Name	First Name	GHP Area	Finalist
Fu	Lynn	Dance	Finalist
Williamson	Jonathan	Engineering-Design	Finalist
Nelson	Katharine	Math	Finalist
Johnson	Kelsey	Music Strings: Viola	Finalist
Li	Sarah	Music Strings: Violin	Finalist
Gui	Haiwen	Music Woodwind: Flute	Finalist
Pei	Richard	Music-Piano	Finalist
Balakumar	Dhakshi	Science	Finalist
Bhattacharya	Shubhom	Science	Finalist
Tantillo	Charles	Science	Finalist
Lee	Susan	Visual Arts	Finalist
Chen	Alexander	WL-Chinese	Finalist

The Georgia Governor’s Honors Program is a four week residential summer program at Valdosta State University for current 10^th and 11^th grade gifted and talented high school students. The program offers instruction which is significantly different from the typical high school classroom and which is designed to provide students with the skills, knowledge, and attitudes necessary to become independent, lifelong learners.

Team Visioning

The visioning meeting at Alpharetta discussed plans to set forth one to one student devices in the near future.

Thomas Time

Professional development with Thomas Van Soelen. 

AP Statistics Experiment

AP Statistics classes are studying inference, the idea of making generalizations about populations from sample results. In class on Monday, March 16, students performed an experiment to determine if long rotor helicopters have a longer descent time than short rotor helicopters. After constructing the two types of helicopters out of paper and paper clips, they did 30 flight trial of each type of helicopter, timing the descents with their cell phones. To determine if there was a difference in the mean descent times, they used the two procedures they learned in class (two sample t-tests and two sample t-intervals) to calculate whether there was statistically significant evidence of a difference.

First year Alpharetta High chapter HOSA makes it National!

We had 22 participants and 16 of them made it to the second round of the State competition. Out of those students, we had 3 finalists and 1 student made it to the national competition! There were 3,650 participants from all over Georgia!

FCCLA Winners

Congrats to Evan Schmitz and Nate Patino who won at FFCLA region competition. Nate Patino, 10th grader took first place in Recycle Redesign project.  Evan Schmitz, 11th grader took second place in Sports Nutrition event.  These students are now going to the state competition in Athens. Good job and good luck boys!

The Prudential Spirit of Community Awards

Kindle Anderson has been awarded a Certificate of Excellence from the 2015 Prudential Spirit of Community Awards.  This signifies Kindle was among the top 10 percent of all applicants from Georgia this year.  He has also been qualified for the President's Volunteer Service Award. Good job Kindle! 

Cool happenings in Social Studies

Nick Phillips and Kurt Davies had their American History students analyze the lyrics to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” this week.  Each student selected a different historical topic to research and came up with a one page summary including a picture and relevant information about the topic.  The song covers  many different political, social, economic, and cultural topics and events from 1949 through 1989.  The students then participated in a gallery walk where they read and learned about all the topics and selected one political, social, economic, and cultural project to summarize as part of their assessment.

Governor Deal Signs Georgia Lacrosse Day Proclamation

In recognition of the fast-growing popularity of the sport of lacrosse within Georgia, Governor Nathan Deal has declared April 25, 2015 to be Georgia Lacrosse Day. This official day of celebration takes place as the SouthEastern Lacrosse Conference (SELC) celebrates their 28th Annual Championship Tournament, which will be played in Johns Creek, Ga., from Friday, April 24, through Sunday, April 26. Friday quarter final games will be played at Northview, Alpharetta and South Forsyth high schools and Greater Atlanta Christian School. Saturday semifinal and Sunday championship games will be played at Northview.

Pictured from left to right: Lynda Smith (Chair of Johns Creek Convention and Visitors Bureau), Doug Horn (SELC President), Justin Westbrook (Northview), Cooper Lyon (South Forsyth), Governor Nathan Deal, Cal Swanson (Alpharetta), Matty Biondich (Northview), Carly Connors (Northview).

Congratulations Muskan!

Muskan Raghuwanshi, a junior at Alpharetta High School has been honored for her exemplary volunteer service with the Presidents Volunteer service award.

Congrats Alpha Speech Team!

Congratulations to our Alpha Speech Team for their success at the 2015 GFCA Speech and Debate State Championship.  Our team won 2nd place in Overall Team Sweepstakes and 2nd Place in Speech Sweepstakes.  Christina Nguyen was crowned state champion in Humorous Interpretation.  Other successes include Conner Kocks,2nd Place in Humorous Interpretation, followed by Lara Strydom, 3rd Place, and Grace Palmer, 5th Place.  In Dramatic Interpretation, Deja Holmes placed 2nd, Morgan Shields, 3rd, Nalah Hill, 5th, and Karthik Ramaswami, 6th.  Kelly Lumpkin and Tate Rehklau finished 2nd in Dup Interpretation, Nalah Hill & Milx Barbose, 3rd, Christina Nguyen & Suma Yellamraju, 4th, Sarah Curtis & Alex Atchison, 5th, Anders Nelson & Karthik Ramaswami, 6th.  Emma Svitil took 3rd Place in Prose & Poetry, and Aakash Malhotra was a semi-finalist in Impromptu Speaking.

Science Olympiad Performance

This is the most 1^st place finishes that an Alpharetta team has ever had at a regional competition, congrats Mr. Cole and Science Olympiad team!

1. Congratulations to the following Science Olympiad members for winning their events at this weekend’s regional competition @ GPC – Clarkston

a. 1st place in Air Trajectory – Dan Doss and Matthew Buxbaum

b. 1st place in Disease Detectives – Nikhil Sethi and Bhanodai Pippola

c. 1st Place in Forensics – Aparna Subramaniam and Jessica Zheng

2. Congratulations to the following Science Olympiad members for medaling their events at this weekend’s regional competition @ GPC – Clarkston

a. 2nd Place in Geologic Mapping – Dan Doss and Matthew Buxbaum

b. 2nd Place in Dynamic Planet – Abby O’Meara and Jessica Zheng

c. 3rd place in Astronomy – Abby O’Meara and Kori Vocke

d. 3rd Place in Cell Bio – Shubham Bhattacharya and Hithardhi Duggireddy

e. 3rd Place in Experimental Design – Julia Gu, Aparna Subramaniam and Jessica Zheng

f. 3rd Place in Protein Modeling – Suvarsha Sura and Nikhil Sethi

g. 3rd Place in Scrambler – Eric Bias

h. 3rd Place in Technical Problem Solving – Chaewon Min and Shumrith Vinnakollu

i. 4th Place in Anatomy – Nikhil Sethi

j. 4th Place in Experimental Design – Sahithi Edavally, Shumrith Vinnakollu, and Gayathri Dhurjadi

Mrs. Futch's Physical Science Class

Ms Futch’s  Alpharetta High School Physical Science class is currently studying Physics.  The classroom activity was to determine the amount of work and power it takes to walk up the stairs every day. The students timed themselves walking and running up the stairs.  In this photo the students are gathering the measurements needed to do the calculations. 

School Play Starts on March 13th