Teacher of the year is a wonderful award, but for World Cultures teacher June Murray the honor is watching her students leave her class with not just knowledge, but compassion for the world.

Murray teaches the World Cultures classes at Hudson High. On April 8, she was awarded Teacher of the Year by the Massachusetts Council for Social Studies. She did not find out about her nomination until she got the email telling her she won.

“I kept asking myself, ‘Is this real?’” Murray said.

For her students, her teaching ability is very real.

“She not only teaches us educational,” said senior Kyah Eichholz, “but also life lessons and how to be a good person.”

“How and what to pay attention to in the world,” said sophomore Jared Graham.

“How to be active in your community,” added senior Michaela Savell.

“And she cares about each individual student,” said Eichholz. “We are not just names on a roster.”

Murray lives up to the great reputation that her students have given her. She has taught in Cali, Colombia, taken her students to Costa Rica and the Amazon, and has done many services to benefit not only her classroom, but the whole world.

Murray went whitewater rafting with her students on the Pacuare River in Costa Rica.

Two years ago, she and her students organized a concert with former child soldier and singer, Emmanuel Jal. Together they raised $10,000  to go towards building schools in Sudan. Currently, her World Cultures: Oceania class is planning an assembly about human trafficking.

Even though she has accomplished much, Murray’s greatest satisfaction comes from simply doing her job. Emails from past students telling of their accomplishments puts a smile on her face.

“I am really honored by the acknowledgement from the state,” she said, “but I get up every morning and I go to work and I do my job. And I love it.”

As a junior, Kenny Manero has a lot to worry about. With the constant pressure to get good grades, hours of homework brought on by his AP American Studies and other challenging classes, and the consistent demand of his extracurricular activities, Manero, like many other students, does not have time to be worrying about the new schedule next year.

For the student body, the new seven-day, five-period schedule has been a controversial and widely misunderstood topic. The new schedule consists of seven classes, or eight depending on the electives, on a rotating A-G day schedule. Two of the seven classes do not meet each day. Most core academic classes will run year long, but electives may only be half a year. Compared to Hudson’s current schedule, classes will be seventy minutes rather than the hour and half most students are accustomed to. Lunches will also be shorter, but only by a few minutes.

The change in class times and increase in classes per day have appeared to be causing the most concerns for students. Students worry about having lots more homework and not having enough time to complete in-class work. Some students are frustrated with the change, but are these frustrations and worries really warranted?

As a full supporter of the new schedule, Principal Brian Reagan has high hopes for the upcoming change. “Any change is difficult,” Reagan says, “but students are pretty resilient.” Reagan plans for the schedule to provide kids with a consistent dose of learning, unlike the current schedule which can lead to almost a full year without taking a certain subject, depending on the layout of your courses.

“The biggest concern was with gaps,” he says. Reagan hopes that by eliminating these gaps with the new schedule, students will be more successful, whether it be on MCAS testing or overall achievement in school.

Reagan does not feel that students should worry about more homework and less class time to finish tasks. “Teachers will have more classes to prepare for, too,” Reagan explains. “They’ll have much more work to grade. That will most likely impact the amount of work given to students.” Also, since two classes are dropped per day, students will have more time to complete the homework in those dropped classes.

Reagan expects that the way classes are run will change as well. He expects that, in order to fit all necessary criteria into the seventy-minute period, teachers will most likely get rid of warm-ups and summarizations of the lesson.

Reagan also believes the new schedule will allow the current science classes, some of which are being taught in regular classrooms, to be moved into lab rooms, making for a positive change in the way classes will function.

Besides worry over the timing of classes, students seem to be concerned about the now mandatory wellness class. The semester-long class is a mix of health and physical education. The class is grade specific, so students should not be expecting repeated topics every year.

Many students assume that the class will be just a typical gym and health class, learning about sexual education and how to eat healthy foods. Director of Guidance Angela Wilcox has a more accurate description of what the wellness class really is. The Wellness class will have different curriculum depending on what grade the student is in. It’ll be a combination of health issues, P.E. activities, and other sports.(Look below for a more specific curriculum description for each grade and more detail at http://www.hudson.k12.ma.us/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=MAuNDPeRF3E%3d&tabid=709)

Wilcox also explains how the new schedule will impact the internship program. “They’re now called independent studies instead of internships,” says Wilcox. “The student interested in an independent study must fill out an application, show the appropriate desire for the independent study, and will ultimately be signed off by the principal.”

Reagan is confident that the new schedule won’t be as overwhelming as students seem to assume. He has high hopes that the new plan will benefit both students and faculty and believes his students are very capable of being successful in the coming years.

Computer teacher Christine Williamson and business teacher Kristopher Langan work with these students every Wednesday after school.

Like father (or mother), like son. That’s what juniors Connor Bentley, Steven Rivela and Dan Bothwell all can say as they follow in the footsteps of their parents who have business careers.

Bentley won first place in the project management concepts event for Business Professionals of America(BPA). On March 2, thirteen students competed at the State Leadership Conference in Framingham. Students who finished in the top two in their event move on to nationals in Orlando, Florida, in May.

Other students who qualified were Christina Butler who won first place in the desktop publishing event and the team of Steven Rivela, Dan Bothwell and Andrew Wienen for their second place finish in the global marketing team event.

Since competing in BPA last year, junior Christina Butler has been hoping to place in nationals. This year is a dream come true.

BPA’s mission is to prepare a world-class workforce through the advancement of leadership and citizenship as well as academic and technological skills.

Bentley got first place on a business test. The test contained questions about business terms (e.g., “What is a CEO?”) and what-would-you-do questions for project management. He learned most of the information from BPA and his father, who is a project manager at Raytheon, a military equipment company. Bentley chose that field of business because of his father. Also, he felt like he had the best chance to succeed if he competed in project management. He was surprised that he came in first place because he did not expect to do that well.

He decided to compete because “it looked good on a college transcript, [and he had] always been interested in business.” Bentley hopes to someday run his own business because he wants to be self-employed.

Bentley enjoyed BPA because it was fun, and he met new people. BPA is different from other clubs because it has  “more interaction with other people, and it prepares you better for the business world.” He has added many Facebook friends from all over Massahcusetts after the state competition. He says in BPA, you actually work with people, not just learn the same stuff as them in a classroom.

Juniors Steven Rivela, Andrew Wienen and Dan Bothwell also participated in BPA. They gave the global marketing team presentation and finished second in the state. They practiced their presentation and poster board for two weeks, and they plan to improve even more for nationals. To improve, they “plan on practicing our speech more as well as altering our plan based upon the judges’ feedback.” The judges told them they loved the presentation, but they would like to see a three year timeline.

Juniors Steven Rivela, Andrew Wienen and Dan Bothwell are all excited for nationals, and they hope to place.

For their global marketing presentation, they were given an idea of a business and developed a marketing plan on how to expand internationally and domestically. The marketing plan consists of pricing strategy, company goals and target consumers.

Like Bentley, Bothwell and Rivela both have parents who work in the business industry. Bothwell’s mother works as a project manager for Raytheon, and his father works as a manager for Wayne-Dalton garage door company. Rivela’s father is a manager at RBI, an indoor batting cage in West Boylston.

They picked global marketing for the competition, so they could work together as a team on the presentation. Wienen was the one that dragged Bothwell and Rivela to the BPA meetings back in the fall.

Rivela plans to participate in BPA again because it was interesting, and you “meet people from other schools and other states.”

Other Hudson High students that placed in the event include Natalie Monteiro, who won fifth place in graphic design promotion; Marisa Duplisea, who won fourth place for her interviewing skills event; the broadcast news team of Shayna Diedrich and Kayla Davis, who won fifth place; and the presentation management team of Alyssa Dalton, Renae Barry and Marisa Duplisea, who placed sixth.

For sophomores Savera Mohammed and Kayla Penniman, the science fair is not an assignment. They have fallen in love with their topic.

Mohammed and Penniman along with two other students competed in the Worcester Regional Science and Engineering fair at WPI on Saturday, March 9. It was the 58th annual fair for both middle and high school students. For Kayla Penniman and Savera Mohammed it was their first time competing at the high school level.

Savera Mohammed and Kayla Penniman present their experiment after over two months of hard work.

Penniman had competed in the middle school fair, and it was “a really cool experience.” This year, Penniman worked with Mohammed on an experiment to see how the brain can detect emotion based off of an athlete’s facial expressions and body language.

To help me understand the test, they had me take it.They cut out pictures of athletes’ faces, their whole bodies, and their upper body without the head. In some situations, the athletes were winning, and in others they were losing. They had twelve pictures: four full bodies, four faces and four upper bodies. In each category, two were winning and two were losing. The person taking the test must guess whether the athlete won based on their facial expressions or body language.

Mohammed and Penniman recorded each person’s results over the course of a month. They tested 20 people per age group, and the age groups were 13-19, 20-29, and 30 or over. They discovered two things. The older you get, the harder it is to detect emotion through body language. They also found that more people got the correct answer when the face was involved. This makes it easier to understand why I only got one wrong; I am fifteen years old. The one I missed was an upper body only picture.

Brain functioning was not their first idea for a science fair project. Originally, they wanted to test human buffers, but they could not keep human blood fresh for a long period of time.

But when biology teacher Julie Snyder and Penniman found the article about their current project, based on an experiment by Hillel Aviezer, Penniman and Mohammed were sure they wanted to work together on the project. Since they have every class together, they have gotten to know each other well and frequently talk about their experiment and discoveries.

They did not have a whole lot of interest in the science fair at first. In fact, Mohammed was only doing it because she needed to do an experiment anyway for AP Biology. But once they started though, they wanted to finish because of their passion for it.

Penniman is interested in how the results vary based on age, and she is curious about brain functioning. Mohammed is also interested in how the brain functions. She is excited to share her findings with other people and wants to make comparisons with the original experiment.

Some of the challenges they have faced are time management and analyzing data because it has complex formulas. They need to make a lot of graphs, such as how age difference affects one’s results.

Time management has been a challenge because they were not too committed to the project at first. Mohammed says they realized they had to get things done, so they increased time spent on the project. Penniman says there were some long nights because “there’s always something new to fix.”

Stephanie Kall and Erica Davis present their experiment about different sunblocks.

This team entered the science fair knowing they were going to have a lot of competition. “At the middle school science fair,” Penniman says, “there are really rich private schools. Some kid built a hovercraft.” Also, one girl built an app for the iPhone. They know they’ll have a lot of competition.

Mohammed has different feelings about the science fair. She says she is excited to present findings to other people, but she is nervous and anxious to be presenting to judges. “It’s nerve wracking to know you’re going to be judged,” she says, with that “voice in the back of your mind saying don’t mess up.”

Penniman realized her favorite subject was science because the only classes she enjoys are the science classes. But Mohammed has “always had an eye open for science.” She is a very curious person, and as a kid “science answered my questions,”she says. Her main goal in life is to be a doctor because she loves biology, and she loves helping people.

The hard work paid off as Mohammed and Penniman got fourth place. Sophomores Stephanie Kall and Erica Davis, who also competed, got honorable mention, for fifth place. Both groups will move on to states on May 3.

The 2010 MetroWest Adolescent Health Survey identified concerning levels of substance use among Hudson youth. Earlier this year, the Town of Hudson applied for and received a three-year grant from the MetroWest Health Foundation for a youth adolescent substance use initiative. This grant will support various initiatives throughout Hudson. The cornerstone of the initiative is a community-based coalition, which will include many community members. The coalition will guide and support all youth substance use initiatives in Hudson.

Coalition goals include building community capacity and reversing the current trend of increasing prevalence of adolescent substance use in Hudson, especially marijuana use and prescription drug misuse.

The Hudson Youth Substance Abuse Prevention Coalition is pleased to announce the recent launch of its website: www.preventhudsonsa.org.

Through discussions about ways to effectively engage youth, parents, and the community, coalition partners agreed that a website would be a helpful forum to educate community members on topics related to youth substance abuse prevention.

The website content is guided by the coalition including community, parent, and youth partners. Topics include:

• Community, youth, and family resources

• Alcohol, tobacco, and other drug facts

• Tools to support healthy decision-making

The website includes information about the initiative, including the coalition strategy, and meeting agendas and minutes. Community events are also highlighted. Community members are encouraged to visit the website and check back for coalition and community-wide updates.

The next coalition meeting is scheduled for April 11. If you or someone you know is interested in participating, please contact Town of Hudson Public Health Director Sam Wong at 978-562-2020 or by email at swong@townofhudson.org.

The Gamecocks face off against the Dream Team in the quarterfinals. The Gamecocks won the game two sets to one and went on to win the whole thing.

by Luke Saliga

This year’s dodgeball tournament was the biggest one yet with tensions rising between some powerhouse teams. The four teams expected to be in the semifinals, the Black Stallion, the Gamecocks, the White Lightning, and the Dodgefathers, did not disappoint.

As the teams got ready, tensions rose. “We don’t like them. They don’t like us, plain and simple,” said James Adams. “It is all about bragging rights. If we win senior year, we get bragging rights for life.” There was a lot of name calling before and after the games between the teams.

“Well it is all fun and games. We really don’t hate each other,” said Ben King, ” but nothing makes a bigger rival than a best friend.”

In the semifinals the White Lightning faced the Dodgefathers, and the Lightning destroyed them winning two sets to none. The Black Stallions and the Gamecocks had a much better game. The Gamecocks won the first set, and then the Black Stallions won the second set. In the third set the Black Stallions had four guys left versus the Gamecocks’ one.

The last Gamecock was team captain James Adams. “I was so nervous I did not want to be the last one out and ruin our entire chances of winning,” said James Adams, “so I pulled it together and shocked everyone who was watching.”

Adams caught two balls thrown at him. That brought two more Gamecocks back in the game to turn the tide, three guys to two. Then the Gamecocks picked off the final two Stallions and advanced to the finals.

The finals pitting the White Lightning and the Gamecocks was another great game coming down to the final set, one on one. This time co-team captain for the Gamecocks Darnell Butler was the last one left. He dodged the first ball thrown at him by diving halfway across the court, and then he threw a sidearm ball right at the other player hitting him in the chest to win the Dodgeball Tournament.

“ I was so happy we won. We had a great run and too many close calls for me at least,” Butler said.

All the money raised in the Dodgeball Tournament, around $800, will be given to the Hudson food pantry. “ We help a good organization, and we let the kids have some competitive fun,” said Principal Reagan.

Elvis, as well as many other decorations from the 50s, help to keep the place hoppin’ and jumpin’.

Smyles, a new frozen yogurt parlor on Washington Street in Hudson,  blends the 1950s American Graffiti soda shop with cutting-edge flavors. Everything from the Marilyn Monroe pictures on the wall to the old music to the life-size model of Elvis singing gives the place a fun, cozy atmosphere.

“It’s a place where people can come and hang out. It’s a fun place with good food, and it has great music,” Smyles founder and owner Murray Levine added with a laugh. “What makes it fun is that you can take as much or as little as you want, and you have all the different toppings. My son figured out that there are 8.1 x 10⁴⁸ different combinations of toppings that you can do.”

If Levine’s son is right about the number of possible combinations of toppings, that number is incredible.

“My favorite kind is vanilla, and for toppings, I do cheesecake and Oreos. It’s addicting. I’m afraid to mix it up because I don’t wanna mess with perfection,” Nashoba seniors Hannah Freeman and Jen Carlson said.

The concept for this amazing yogurt came two years ago in Washington D.C. Levine had been working as a freelance graphic designer in a marketing department, but the idea of owning a self-serve frozen yogurt business spurred him into action. Levine and his family decided, “Let’s go ahead and try it!”

It took a year for Levine and his family to find a good location for their soon-to-be-business. The properties he visited were either not in a good area or too expensive. But the group had no doubts about their venture, so they were confident they would find the right place. Eventually, he found what he considered a great spot (in Hudson next to CVS and Stop and Shop), which is where Smyles is now.

The easiest part of getting Smyles ready for business was choosing the name. Murray and his wife have two sons, named Scott and Myles. “Also, when people eat the yogurt, they smile!” Levine said enthusiastically.

That is where the easy part ended. Since Levine had no prior knowledge of frozen yogurt, “I learned a lot on the fly,” he recalled. Between asking other store owners and business people in the market for their advice, and the construction, outsourcing, design, and decoration, Levine went down two belt sizes. “There was a lot of waking up at four in the morning saying, ‘What the heck am I doing?’”

Another thing that makes Smyles unique is the different yogurt flavor combinations. The typical soft-serve machine has two handles for separate flavors, but also a third handle for a mix. The combo flavors that Levine and his family have come up with are mouth-watering. Pumpkin pie and cheesecake, make pumpkin cheesecake, and apple pie and vanilla make apple pie a la mode. Simple, but classic.

Two customers of Smyles, Hannah Freeman and Jen Carlson, often travel after school to have their favorite Smyles creations.

One combination happened purely by accident. Sea salt caramel happened to end up next to dark chocolate, and it has been very popular ever since. The combo “is absolutely fantastic, and I did it by accident. There’s no name for it, but it’s really good!” Levine said.

Levine also wanted to share some advice with anyone who wants to be an entrepreneur and start something new. “If you have an idea and you can come up with a plan,” he urges, “you should definitely go for it!”

A freshman presents his CAP project in 2011.

by Cassy Moran

Hudson High is a school of traditions. From Turkey Day to graduation, every student has a chance to experience them. However, traditions change, just like the CAP or Community Action Project. This year, for the second year, there will be organizations coming to present and interest students in volunteering.

“They really get the information out about their organizations and show kids different ways that they can volunteer,” says junior Eric Davis, who is organizing the speakers.

‘We have already had Agape and Habitat for Humanity come in to speak,” says Davis. “Relay for Life, Andrew’s Helpful Hands, Special Olympics and many others are going to the Volunteer Fair.” At the fair, which takes place in January, kids will be able to choose where they want to volunteer.

The entire freshman class will be helping with a spelling bee hosted by the Hudson Education Foundation. In addition to that whole class project, each freshman will do a project with his or her English/Civics class.

Other CAP projects this year include the blood drive and work with Heifer International or Project Bread.

Freshman teachers think the project is beneficial to students’ learning.

“Students get the opportunity to learn about a social issue and to develop real life skills such as making phone calls, presenting, informing the public, marketing and so on,” says social studies teacher Pamela Porter.

“My favorite part of the CAP project is seeing the students work hard to brainstorm and organize a successful project,”  says English teacher Andrea Hardy.

I also enjoy the excitement students feel when they realize that they have really made a difference in the community or world,” says Hardy. Even students are excited to help their community.

“The CAP Project is a nice way to teach students responsibility and gives them an opportunity to help the society,” says freshman Braden Rendano.

Some students are planning to make the CAP an annual thing. “I love the CAP project,” says freshman Bhumi Patel. “ I want to continue to volunteer next year. I think it’s a great idea.”

The CAP project continues to be a great tradition at Hudson High.