Congrats Class of 2009

Have a fun and safe prom tonight!  We know you will all look amazing.

On Tuesday you graduate from High School and will move on to some amazing school and other places. We at library wish you all the success in the world and remember if you ever need help with research or a paper we are always there for you.

Congrats Grads!!

Save the Words Website

Save the Words is a really great website that everyone should go to.

Here is a descriptions from the website :

“If you love words as much as we do, find room for them again is conversation and written communication. Each time you use one of these words, you are keeping it alive in the English language. “

What word did you save today?

Summer Reading List

Incoming students in Grades 9 and 10 will have the opportunity to experience award-winning, high-interest, multi-cultural, non-fiction books over the summer. Students will be required to read two engaging books and then discuss key concepts about each book with classmates when they return in the fall. One book will be from a list of suggested titles (below); the second book will be a book-of-choice (any genre, any book). Since some books may contain controversial and/or sensitive material, parents are encouraged to be a part of their son/daughter’s book selection process.

For students and parents who are looking for more guidance with the book-of-choice, we recommend you review the College Board’s website “101 Great Books Recommended for College-Bound Readers”

Students are encouraged to complete a “Bookmark” and/or graphic organizer to assist in their reading comprehension as they read their books (a sample graphic organizer and “Bookmark” follow the book lists). In September, class time will be spent discussing the key concepts in the non-fiction texts. In addition, students will construct a letter to the author of the book-of-choice as part of the “Letters About Literature” essay contest sponsored by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress. The contest prompts students to write a letter to the author- discussing the effect the book had on the reader. The assignment is available online here for review: In an effort to promote more independent reading during the course of the school year, a collection of the summer reading books will be housed in English classroom libraries starting in September. Students will be encouraged to read additional books based upon peer recommendations during the course of the school year. This new initiative is supported by the district administration, Words Bookstore in Maplewood, and a SOMEF grant. Although the purchase of summer reading books is recommended, summer reading books are available in the Maplewood and South Orange public libraries. Please contact me via e-mail if there is any trouble locating a summer reading title. We hope this initiative will broaden your child’s love of literature and increase his/her interest in the art of reading.

Have a great summer.

Book Selections for Incoming Columbia High School Freshmen and Sophomores

9th Grade

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown

Close to shore: a true story of terror in an age of innocence by Michael Capuzzo

In My Hands: memories of a Holocaust rescuer by Irene Gut Opdyke

Funny in Farsi: a memoir of growing up in America by Dumas Firoozeh

The Jump: Sebastian Telfair and the high stakes business of high school ball by Ian O’Connor

Once Upon a Quinceanera: coming of age in the USA by Julia Alvarez

Shadow Divers: the true adventure of two Americans who risked everything to solve one of the last mysteries of World War II by Robert Kurson

7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens by Sean Covey

10th Grade

The Glass Castle: a memoir by Jeannette Walls

Dreams from My Father: a story of race and inheritance by Barack Obama

Tuesdays with Morrie: an old man, a young man, and life’s greatest lesson by Mitch Albom

One Writer’s Beginnings by Eudora Welty

Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt

If you have any questions please speak email Gary Pankiewicz Supervisor of Secondary English Language Arts at gpankiew@somsd.k12.nj.us

For a detailed list of the books and the assignment please visit the CHS website.

Check out our Database Trials

We are doing a trial on them and would love to know your thoughts.
Should they be part of our collection?
Email us: emalespi@somsd.k12.nj.us or stop by the library and let us know.

Pop Culture Universe: http://pop.greenwood.com
The African American Experience: http://aae.greenwood.com
Daily Life Through History: http://dailylife.greenwood.com
Daily Life in America: http://dla.greenwood.com

To get remote access information talk to one of the librarians or email us.

Cohen Family Inducted into CHS Hall of Fame

Congratulations to the 2008-2009 Columbia High School Hall of Fame Inductees.

This year the Hall of Fame Committee chose an entire family to be inducted.  The Cohen family—Ben, Joan, Amy and Dan, all attended Columbia High School and went on to greater accomplishments in life.

Ben became a lawyer and was named the first General Counsel to the New Jersey Casino Control Commission.  In 1981 he was appointed to serve as a Judge of the Superior Court where he presided over family court cases, criminal court cases, and civil cases.

Joan was an elementary school teacher and went on to attain a master’s degree in psychology.  While working towards her professional diploma, Joan did an internship at Columbia High School; she is a nationally certified school psychologist.  Not satisfied with these accomplishments, Joan went on to earn her counselor’s certification, which is the work she does today.

Amy competed on the girl’s gymnastics and volleyball teams while at Columbia.  She continued competing as a varsity gymnast at Brown.  When the University abolished women’s gymnastics as a varsity sport, Amy and her teammates instituted a ground-breaking Title IX lawsuit (Cohen vs. Brown) and became involved in a battle over equality for women in collegiate sports.  The lawsuit went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, and decided in her favor.  Amy was named one of the Twenty Most Influential Women in Sports by “Women’s Sports and Fitness” magazine, and a Woman of the Year by “Ms. Magazine”, and was given a Woman of Distinction Award by the National Conference for College Women Student Leaders.  Amy now teaches in an international school in Costa Rica.

Dan was on the varsity wrestling team, was Student Council Treasurer, and actively involved in the TV Arts program and CCN.  This led to his decision to study communications and major in television production in college.  Dan’s full time TV career began with an opportunity to work as a production assistant on a new cable TV network that was being launched in October of 1996:  the Fox News Channel.  At Fox Dan worked on five different programs, achieving the position of Senior Coordinating Producer.  He currently works with the show “Hannity” where he oversees a team of field producers and tape producers.

Pay Library Fine with Canned Goods Extended

The food drive is going so well we decided to extend it till April break.

We already have collected over 200 canned goods items! Good job CHS!

Pay a Library Fine with Canned Goods.

Got a Library Fine? Pay up with Non Perishable Food Items.
This program will be going on from February 23 to March 20th. One item for every fine dollar. Please note that this does not include lost book fines. The food will be donated to a local food bank.

If you have any questions or would like to donate even if you do not have a fine please come to the library.

Teen Uses Risky Behavior on My Space-

Just want to let people know about this new study. As we at the library have said to you before, please be aware of what you are posting on line. Also if you are going to have a MySpace or Facebook account make sure that everything in it is set as private so that only people you want can see what you have posted.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – More than half of teenagers mention risky behaviors such as sex and drugs on their MySpace accounts, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

They said many young people who use social networking sites such as News Corp’s MySpace do not realize how public they are and may be opening themselves to risks, but the sites may also offer a new way to identify and help troubled teens.

“We found the majority of teenagers who have a MySpace account are displaying risky behaviors in a public way that is accessible to a general audience,” said Dr. Dimitri Christakis of Seattle Children’s Research Institute, whose studies appear in the journal Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine.

In one of two studies, Christakis and Dr. Megan Moreno of the University of Wisconsin analyzed 500 randomly chosen MySpace profiles of 18-year-olds in 2007.

Overall, 54 percent of the publicly available accounts they checked contained information about high-risk behaviors: 41 percent mentioned substance abuse, 24 percent sexual behavior and 14 percent violence.

Christakis said many teens are unaware of how public and permanent Internet information can be, while parents often do not know what their kids are up to.

“No one says, “Whoa! Why are you putting that up there?’” Christakis said.

In a second study, the researchers identified 190 individuals aged 18 to 20 whose MySpace accounts displayed multiple risky behaviors. Half were sent a message from “Dr. Meg” from Dr. Moreno’s MySpace profile.

The message warned about the risks of disclosing personal details online and offered a link to a site with information about testing for sexually transmitted diseases.

Three months after this single message, many of the young people had withdrawn references to sex and substance abuse and tightened security controls.

“It really provides the opportunity to reach millions of potential at-risk teens and try to modify their behaviors or at least prevent them from disclosing them to the entire world,” Christakis said in a telephone interview.

The e-mail was most effective at curtailing references to sex, with 13.7 percent of profiles in the group that received the warning deleting all references, compared with 5.3 percent of those who were not sent the message.

Christakis said displaying sexual information online can expose a teen to advances from sexual predators. Employers and universities may also check those sites.

(Editing by Alan Elsner and Maggie Fox)

Happy 40th Birthday Ultimate! CHS in the News Again!

Now abc new has an article about the 40th Anniversary! If you have a chance check out the game tomorrow night at 8:00 at the Parking Lot.

How Ultimate Frisbee Began 40 Years Ago

By MARK MOONEY

Nov. 26, 2008 —

On Thanksgiving night, a group of adults, including some pushing 60, will gather in an unused high school parking lot for the holiday tradition of playing a game of Ultimate Frisbee.

That parking lot in the New Jersey suburb of Maplewood is where the game of Ultimate Frisbee began and this year’s game will mark the 40th anniversary of the sport.

In a corner of the lot is a weathered metal plaque embedded in a rock that proclaims “Birth Place of Ultimate Frisbee Created by Columbia High School Students in 1968.”

Cooperstown it’s not, but from that cracked splotch of pavement, Ultimate Frisbee — or Ultimate as it’s known to players — has spread throughout college campuses and around the world.

It has become so popular, and in some places so competitive, it has spawned an official rule book, a regulatory body known as the Ultimate Players Association and dueling national championship games.

“I marvel at it sometimes,” said movie producer Joel Silver, who is to Ultimate Frisbee what Abner Doubleday was to baseball.

“It’s kind of a shock that it’s reached such proportions,” Silver, better known for his “Matrix,” “Lethal Weapon” and “Die Hard” series, told ABCNews.com.

As a Columbia High School student in 1968 and a member of the school’s student council, he won a vote, almost as a joke, to have the game declared a club sport. He and a couple of fellow students refined the rules from football’s first-down rules to the fast paced free flowing game that has swarmed across hundreds of college campuses and around the world.

Silver recalled, as a teenager, watching the game he helped invent and saying to another student on the sidelines, “Someday they’ll be playing this game all over the world. And the kid said, ‘Yeah, right.’

Silver brought a version of the game to Columbia High School from a summer in Massachusetts. He taught it to his pals and they revised the rules until they were codified and printed up by Silver and two friends, Jonny Hines and Bernard “Buzzy” Hellring. Hellring died in a car accident and Hines is now a lawyer in Moscow.

The name also evolved from Guts Frisbee, where they lined up and simply threw it at each other as hard as they could, to Speed Frisbee, Ultimate’s forerunner. Thinking Speed Frisbee didn’t sound very cool, Silver suggested Ultimate Frisbee instead.

“It was all very kind of funny, silly and we played in the faculty parking lot because it was lit at night,” he said. “It was always kind of a counterculture kind of joke.”

It was the students after him who began to take the game seriously, Silver said.

“Classes in the years after us had the fervor and they took it to their colleges and were really serious about it. They were the Johnny Appleseeds,” Silver said.

That seriousness remains. In the halls of Columbia High School, which serves the sister towns of Maplewood and South Orange, Ultimate is not a sport for unaggressive peace-loving hippie types. The school has won the New Jersey state championship eight years running and is the reigning champion for the eastern United States.

Although it has standing only as a club sport, its players train with a dedication that the school’s varsity football team can only dream about.

When the team plays for keeps, it is a game remarkable for its speed and the gleeful willingness of players to launch themselves into the air to catch a frisbee and land stretched out, breaking their fall with their chins, or chests or knees.

Maplewood takes pride in its frisbee heritage and its teams. The Columbia players are split into an A team and a B team, instead of varsity and junior varsity.

The B team is composed of players as young as eighth-graders, and the town recreation department has a training program for kids that starts in the sixth-grade.

Coaches warn the kids and their parents that they expect year-round dedication to Ultimate that will produce another championship.

Silver, 56, has made his reputation as a high-powered and flamboyant mogul of Hollywood, but he looks back at his creation with affection.

He says he has some frisbees “somewhere in my house,” and recently took his 7-year-old son to Maplewood to show him the plaque in the parking lot and teach him how to throw the disc.

“I hope at the end of my obit they will say that I invented Ultimate Frisbee,” he said.

He was serious.

Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures

Columbia High School Ultimate Frisbee in the NY Times

A great article in today’s NY Times about Columbia High School being the birthplace of Ultimate Frisbee.

By DAVE CALDWELL

MAPLEWOOD

ALMOST every day after school in the fall and spring, an athletic team with a unique tradition gathers for practice on a large lawn, bare in spots, that runs downhill from a baseball diamond to a rock-strewn creek near the New Jersey Transit rail station.

Memorial Park is a place to play ball: baseball, pickup basketball and football, tennis, field hockey and lacrosse. But these two dozen athletes, sweating and chattering like members of any other sports team, are throwing a white disc to each other.

The boys are members of Columbia High School’s Ultimate Frisbee A team. There is also a Columbia B team of younger players, and a girls’ team, which was started in 2005. About 75 Columbia students play on the three teams, and the number is growing.

Ultimate Frisbee has been compared to soccer or football — except that a flying disc is used, not a ball. The object of the limited-contact sport is to score by passing a disc to a player in the opposing end zone. (The name was shortened to Ultimate, because it now uses a disc made by a company called Discraft, and not a Frisbee made by Wham-O).

But the disc is not the only difference. The sport, which is played by millions of adults and children internationally, was invented right here at Columbia High in 1968 by a group of student leaders who did not think of themselves as athletes.

“It was originally created to be a sport that was an anti-sport,” said Anthony Nunez, a 1998 Columbia alumnus who now coaches the A team. “If you’d go to a game then, you’d see hippies with long hair having a good time. It’s turned into a game that’s created a lot of athletes and competition.”

Tim Morrissy, a senior who is one of three co-captains of the Columbia A team, said: “It’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me. I was not very athletic and not very focused on anything, and I know I was suffering in my grades.

“It helps me stay sane. It helps me concentrate on classes, because I can take all my anger out at practice.”

Tim was a skateboarder. Jordan Taylor, a senior who is another team captain, ran cross-country as a ninth grader, but then joined the Ultimate team and dropped cross-country. He said many Ultimate players do not like to be reminded that the sport has a hippie heritage and, even at Columbia, still does not carry a high profile among students. “They’ll say, ‘Is that the thing you play with dogs?’ ” Jordan said, smiling.

Ultimate is not a varsity sport at Columbia. Coaches volunteer their time. Team members pay a $150 fee to cover uniforms and insurance. They buy their own soccer shoes, and hold bake sales or garage sales to cover travel costs.

“It’s just a different atmosphere,” said Stephen Panasci, a former Columbia player who now plays Ultimate at North Carolina State University, where he is a junior landscape design major. “It’s being run by the players, mostly. Even though there are coaches, most of the decisions are being made by the players.”

The Columbia A team has won eight consecutive state championships and it plays in tournaments against college club teams. A Sunday-morning program run by the Maplewood Recreation Department is popular among sixth to eighth graders.

Many of the best players continue after high school. Stephen Panasci’s older brother, Emilio, Columbia High School class of 2000, plays for a club team, the Pride of New York. There are Sunday pickup games at Memorial Park for less-intense players.

“Everybody finds a place in Ultimate that they like,” Emilio Panasci said. “So much of it is about creating an atmosphere where everybody buys into the collective.”

That was the general intent when the sport was invented. Joel Silver, the film producer, who was then a junior at Columbia, had played a less-structured form of the game at summer camp, and, at the high school, he proposed at a student council meeting that Frisbee be added to the curriculum.

The council, as a joke, passed the motion. Joel, Bernard Hellring, known to classmates as Buzzy, and Jonny Hines immediately began drawing up rules for the game, first called Speed Frisbee. The first official game was played behind the high school.

The action soon moved to a new student parking lot down the street. The lot is still there, its surface cracked and rutted with potholes. In the corner is a stone marker, erected in 1989, with a circular plaque carrying an inscription: “Birthplace of Ultimate Frisbee, created by Columbia High School students in 1968.”

The lot is used only once a year now. Every Thanksgiving weekend since 1970, a team of Columbia students plays a team of alumni — the longest continuously held event in the sport’s history. Players say it really feels more like a class or a family reunion.

“I have yet to have met one bad kid in all the years I have coached or played the game,” Mr. Nunez said.

The alumni game is again on tap, and a parents’ committee is planning a 40th anniversary dinner for the spring. Earlier this year, the team raised funds by selling $10 anniversary discs with a bold “1968” printed in the middle.

“I consider myself lucky,” said Jordan Taylor. “If I lived in another town, I wouldn’t have heard of Ultimate at all.”