News

East School Interim Principal John Grasso To Start Tuesday

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An interim principal who has led a number of public elementary schools in lower Fairfield County in the past, including in New Canaan, will start Tuesday at East School, district officials say. John Grasso will serve as interim principal of the Little Brook Road school through the end of this academic year, as Kris Woleck works into her new position as an assistant superintendent in New Fairfield, according to a press release issued by New Canaan Public Schools. Grasso had retired in 2012 from the Greenwich district after serving as principal at Riverside School. Since then, he has served in interim positions throughout the county, including principal of Royale Elementary School in Darien from 2014 to 2016, Parkway Elementary School in Greenwich from 2016 to 2017, Hamilton Avenue STEM Magnet School in Greenwich from 2018 to 2019 and South School in New Canaan from 2019 to 2020. The district is “incredibly fortunate” to have him back, Superintendent of Schools Dr. Bryan Luizzi said in the release.

Around Town

NCHS ‘Student Visionaries’ Launch Campaign To Fight Leukemia and Other Blood Cancers

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Charlotte Lee’s aunt, a mother of three, was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia five years ago. The New Canaan High School sophomore recalled her dad relaying a doctor’s prognosis that if her aunt didn’t get treatment immediately, she would die in six weeks. “It was so scary, because her kids were all in high school or younger,” Lee recalled Wednesday, adding: “I know they were really scared about living without their mom.”

Thankfully, Lee’s aunt did undergo treatment and recovered, though the harrowing experience left a mark on the teen. And now, Lee and two of her classmates and friends—Sophia La Magna and Victoria Vaccaro—are raising funds to help fight leukemia, lymphoma, myeloma and other blood cancers . The trio has entered as team “Ramming Cancer” in the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s 2024 Westchester-Fairfield Student Visionaries of the Year campaign (their donation page is here).

Abby Dymond

Residents Call on BOE To Find Sustainable Solutions in School Cafeterias

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Town residents during Monday’s Board of Education meeting called on the public schools to pursue more sustainable ways of serving food and discarding food waste. Margot Bright Thorsheim, a board member and secretary of Planet New Canaan, said that the district ranks among the best in the nation “primarily due to our financial resources, and the vision of the people on this Board and in our administration and its faculty.”

“However, many believe that one educational component is missing in this town, and I would also like to advocate for greener schools in the New Canaan district,” Bright Thorsheim told members of the Board of Ed during their regular meeting, held in the Wagner Room at New Canaan High School. “We have yet to show our youth some basic principles of caring for their home and the planet that their children will inherit,” she continued. “Even while we as parents teach our kids to be environmentally respectful, they are going to school and learning that we live in a disposable economy where convenience rules the day, regardless of the long-term cost. And even though we know what is wrong, we have used disposable cafeteria supplies for decades and throw away all of our food waste.

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NCHS Senior Luke Huang Earns Top-300 Ranking from Society for Science [Q&A]

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New Canaan High School senior Luke Huang has been selected as one of the top 300 scholars in the Society for Science’s 2024 Regeneron Science Talent Search. The nation’s oldest science and math competition for high school seniors, it’s designed to recognize promising student scientists researching ideas that could make extraordinary contributions to the world’s most pressing scientific issues. Huang was selected from a pool of 

According to the Society of Science, scholars were selected from a pool of 2,126 applications from 712 high schools across 46 states, Guam, Puerto Rico and other nations. Each entry is reviewed by three or more doctorate degree scientists, engineers, or mathematicians based on the subject area of entry. The Top 40 Finalists of the 300 student scholars will be selected Wednesday, where they will then compete for more than $1.8 million in awards in a week-long competition in Washington, D.C. The top-10 winners of that group will be announced in March. 

We met Huang at New Canaan Library on Monday afternoon.

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Meet Kelly DelMazio, New Coordinator of the Senior Internship Program at NCHS

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Town resident Kelly DelMazio started this week as the new senior internship coordinator at New Canaan High School. 

The Senior Internship Program sees NCHS seniors placed in internships around the community during the final three to four weeks of their senior year of high school. 

We talked to DelMazio about the program, her interest in it and the need for more host businesses and organizations this spring (her email is kelly.delmazio@ncps-k12.org). Here’s a transcript of our interview. ***

New Canaanite: Please give us some of your own background in New Canaan and with the schools. Kelly DelMazio: I actually come from higher education. I worked in higher education for 13 years.