Articles by Beth Pipes

by Caroline Bartholomew ’15, Anthony Candelori-Moraglia ’16, Sophie Geagan ’18, Beth Pipes ’18, and Evan Sweitzer ’20 As the Middle and Upper School newspapers worked together on this collaborative issue, we realized that there were many things that we did not know about each other. Until now, the different parts of our school have been separated, but now we are joining together as “OneFCS” to learn and share, respectively, about life as an upper schooler from the writers and editors of FOCUS. As middle schoolers who will soon be going to upper school, we were curious to learn what the upper schoolers had to say about life in the Upper School. SG, BP, and ES: What is the most important thing you have learned in your Upper School experience? CB and ACM: Learning to have an open mind. There are a lot of opportunities in Upper School, so students learn to…

The 2013 Middle School Winter Musical, Once Upon a Mattress, is a twist on the classic fairytale The Princess and the Pea.  The company consists of students in grades six through eight in lead roles, the ensemble and the stage crew.  The cast rehearses three times each week, working hard to make their acting, singing and choreography a success.  The musical will be performed over the final weekend of the first trimester. In the play, the overprotective Queen will only allow a “real” princess to marry the Prince, and she gives every potential princess courting for his hand tests that are impossible to pass.  She finds herself facing a new and much more difficult situation when fun-loving Princess Winnifred arrives from her home in the swamps, setting off a stream of energetic musical numbers and comical scenes as the Queen does everything in her power to keep Winnifred from passing…

In eighth grade science classes, students visit the East Branch of Indian Creek weekly to conduct calculations, including tests of the turbidity, phosphate, nitrate and pH levels of the water. They take detailed notes on the overall health of the creek and, thanks to the Streamwatch Committee, the stream’s conditions have greatly improved. Test results have been fairly strong this year. The chemical levels, including phosphate levels, have sloped toward the norm. Once drastically out of control, the levels are closer to what is considered healthy. This is an incredibly impressive feat given the circumstances at the start. “There was a rusted shopping cart. There was a rusted boiler. There was plaster and there were bricks. It was covered in invasive plants. And I remember going down there to pick up trash and one of my students said, ‘Mr. Ross, we could do this every week and it would never…

In 1981, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously voted to create a day of peace on which there would be a military ceasefire, and the world would be without war for that day. On September 21, 2013, our school community celebrated International Peace Day. Since it fell on a Saturday this year, FCS celebrated it on Friday, carrying the spirit of peace all through the day. In the morning, we held an assembly for the Lower, Middle, and Upper Schools.  The combined choruses sang three songs, each representing a vision of peace. In addition to the beautiful singing, we heard a beautiful peace poem written and read aloud by students in Mr. Terrell’s eighth grade Language Arts class.  We also heard Mrs. Crowley speak about the CTC, which was created in the memory of Chris T. Campbell, an FCS lifer.  He loved soccer, and played it both at Friends’ Central…