Food Security

Last week SAGE dining services director Ed Comer donated leftover food from the WA dining hall to Rachel’s Table a volunteer-based organization that picks up unsold and unserved food from institutions ranging from schools to restaurants for delivery to 35 different soup kitchens, shelters, and neighborhood pantries in Worcester area.

Nearly 100,000 people living in Worcester County experience food insecurity throughout the year. The United Nations World Food Summit (1996) defined food security as existing ““when all people at all times have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life”. Here in Worcester

WA 2013 Carbon Reductions of 16%

Emissions for select Scope 1,2, and 3 sources were reduced by 16% compared with the 2006 baseline. Worcester Academy remains committed to attaining carbon neutrality by 2020.An executive summary report of the WA 2013 Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory is available for download below.

Worcester Urban Orchards

Staff from the Worcester Tree Initiative (WTI) were on campus today planting four species of  fruit trees (Satsuma and Burbank Plum, Luscious and and D’Anjou Pear) as part of their city wide effort to to cultivate urban orchards. Diverse, edible, and resilient urban greenscapes that promote public health and ecological integrity are a shared priority for Worcester Academy and the WTI. Pictured on the left: Executive Director, Peggy Middaugh, Program Coordinator, Ruth Seward, and Assistant Program Coordinator, Derek Lirange. The Pears and Plums add to the existing edible campus permaculture of apples, peaches, blueberries, black raspberries, mulberries, grapes, and serviceberries.

WA 6th Grade Annual Tree Project

Last week 6th grade science students worked with urban foresters from Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation on the planting of thirteen trees on Central Campus. The 6th grade class’s annual spring planting tradition is part of WA’s broader participation in the the city’s efforts to plant 30,000 trees by 2014. Species selected were non-Asian Longhorned Beetle hosts, indige-nous, adding to stand diversity, enhancing biodiversity, and/or edibles producing.

WA Students visit ISO New England Facility

Last week students participating in the Energy Systems Studies Seminar, along with Dr. Murnane and Mr. Carroll, traveled to Holyoke to learn about ISO New England, ” the not-for-profit corporation responsible for keeping electricity flowing across the six-state New England region”.

Student Roundtable with Roy Scranton

For the WA Upper School Earth Day Assembly writer, scholar, and veteran, Roy Scranton, delivered a talk on climate change and its implications for humans living in the Anthropocene epoch. Mr. Scranton met with ten students as part of a roundtable discussion following the assembly.

Remembrances of Worcester

FRIDAY LUNCH SPEAKER SERIES

WA is increasingly turning its strategic vision towards urban leadership. What can we learn  from personal stories and the ways in which things once shined in Worcester ? Ms. Shusas, Ms. Cotton, and Dr. Butler  will form a panel  to reflect on growing up in the city. Q&A to follow.

EVENT INFORMATION: Friday, April 4th  US Lunch Period   Kingsley 39   Pepe’s pizza provided  RSVP: mike.carroll@worcesteracademy.org

Carcharodon carcharias

FRIDAY LUNCH SPEAKER SERIES (Midwinter 2014)
The Friday Lunch Speaker series entailed a midwinter talk titled The Reemergence of the Atlantic Great White Shark in New England. For links to a wide array of data, research, and conservation organizations & resources – including a fantastic poster on the great white shark biology and ecology , an amazing yet controversial real-time shark tracker application, and Maya Lin’s exquisite online interactive memorial exhibit “What is Missing?”:

Worcester Municipal Water System

FRIDAY LUNCH SPEAKER SERIES (fall 2013)
Worcester receives over 50 inches of annual precipitation. A water treatment facility located in Holden, MA uses 600 miles of underground pipe to transport on average 23 million gallons a day of filtered municipal water throughout the city– the facility draws from an 8-billion gallon 10 reservoir-system located across the northern Blackstone Watershed and southern Nashua River Watershed in the towns of Rutland, Leicester, Paxton, and Holden.

What in water did Bloom,

waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?” – James Joyce.

Joyce’s forty-answer response from the epic work Ulysses is on display in its entirety on the first floor of  Kingsley. This display and each of its answers, posted individually by water spigots and fountains across campus, are installed for the community’s consideration, enjoyment, and reflection.  What of our own analytical, imaginative, and attuning capacities for our daily life and the biophysical world? The What in Water Project calls upon a cultivated engagement of the arts, sciences, & humanities to enable multi/inter/trans disciplinary work and expression. We are invited to consider how our conventionally organized disciplines become inseparable or indistinguishable in important ways. How might we best address the nature of the world with its multiple, complex phenomenon and challenges? Where is the space of dynamic interdisciplinary thought, inquiry, and engagement?