June 4, 2001 – As Coral Bay School nears the end its first academic year, family and friends are invited to an event that is expected to become an annual tradition, Community Night.
The gathering will take place at 6 p.m. Tuesday — not at the school, but in the Great Room of Pine Peace School, where most of the Coral Bay middle-school students got their elementary education. The program will consist of presentations by Coral Bay's entire first-year student body — 16 seventh-, eighth- and ninth-grade students — on the 11-day tour of the U.S. Southwest they took in the first half of May.
The youngsters will present slide shows, talk about their individual research projects and display a couple of hot-off-the-printer copies of the journal of their travels that they are in the process of publishing. The 45-page journal, being produced by the students on school computers, "has color photos on every page, and we're really excited for people to see it," school co-administrator Scott Crawford said. It will sell for $10.
Places the students visited included the Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde and Canyon de Chelly National Parks; the Petrified Forest; an old silver mine at Silverton, Colo., and a Navajo reservation.
Plans call for such tours to be an annual, optional part of the private St. John school's integrated learning curriculum, which combines hands-on experience with classroom instruction. Costs of this year's trip were covered through school fees, a fund-raiser and a school donation.
Coral Bay School will add 10th grade next fall, then grades 11 and 12 in the following two years. By the time the school has six grades, there will probably be separate trips for middle-school and high-school students, Crawford said.
Tuesday night's program is free and open to the public. It won't run late, as the students have one more day of regular classes on Wednesday, then start final exams on Thursday that will run through the 13th.