Thurston Middle School is one of 48 schools selected this year by the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform as a School to Watch, its president, Dr. Irvin Howard, said at an assembly last Friday. According to the program’s standards of achievement, Thurston has shown it is “academically excellent, developmentally responsive and socially equitable.” Howard [...]
Students perform in several crowd-pleasing concerts over the next week that are open to the public and take place at the Artists’ Theatre, 625 Park Ave. On Dec. 14 and 15 at 7:30 p.m., the LBHS Dance Department program, “Essence,” features professional and student choreographers along with department directors Lisa Jay and Danielle Pigneri. Professional [...]
Liv Mitchell, a seventh-grade Thurston Middle School student and member of SoCal Divers, competed in and won two medals at the USA age group Junior Olympic Diving National Championships. Liv competed among 315 divers in Greensboro, N.C., Aug. 1-3.
The public school music programs at Thurston Middle School and Laguna Beach High School received a $5,000 gift from the Festival of Arts Foundation this year. The donation helped replace instruments, provide scholarships, allowed the bands to participate in competitions and continues to improve the program. The Boys & Girls Club of Laguna Beach was [...]
To keep students engaged and learning, Thurston Middle School’s principal encourages her staff to share instruction ideas with each other during SMARTbytes, a portion of staff meetings devoted to classroom innovations. “Our SMARTbytes provide opportunities in a quick, five minute format to share strategies that continue to keep us in the forefront of great instructional [...]
Thurston Students Win PTA Competition Thurston Middle School students, eighth-graders Austin Fickman and Molly McMillen, recently received awards in the PTA Reflections contest in the county’s fourth district division. The nationwide contest based on the theme “Diversity Means” celebrates creativity in art, literature, photography, filmmaking, musical composition and dance choreography. Molly’s poem [...]
Thurston Middle School’s student actors will be performing “Up The Down Staircase” a look at student life in a New York City public school, which began this week. Remaining performances are at 4 p.m. Friday, March 2 and Saturday, March 3. with an additional 7:30 p.m. performance on March 3. Tickets are available [...]
Twenty functional but obsolete laptops used by Thurston Middle School students were donated by the district to the Laguna Beach Boys and Girls Club. Though the computers cannot run current district software, they still have a useful life for home use, said the district’s technology director, Victor Guthrie. The donation will provide computers to community [...]
Edmodo’s “friends” list is among the fastest growing in the school district. Last August, just five teachers and 141 students had Edmodo accounts. Currently, 32 district teachers and 842 students are registered with Edmodo, a free and secure social networking platform. “We continue to build the culture and curriculum needed to support digital-age learning through [...]
Thurston Middle School’s Sports Swap provided a chance to sell and buy gently used sports equipment with part of the sale proceeds going to Thurston Middle School’s PTA-sponsored programs. Co-chairs Sheri Morgan, Lori Levine and Christine Niermeijer were thrilled by the participation earlier in the month. “We started the day with over 40 surfboards, [...]
During soccer playoffs at Thurston Middle School last weekend, the under 10 girls team Purple Pillow Fighters went advanced to the shoot out finals and won the championship by a single goal.
Travel the campus at Thurston Middle School and it is apparent that protecting the environment is a lesson modeled for students and staff throughout the campus. Green recycle bins are available at various locations. Gardens planted with a variety of native, succulents dot the landscape. A colorful recyclable container with the reminder to “Love Your [...]
During the recent Thurston Middle School Renaissance Day, seventh-grade students sampled life in medieval times. The in-house “field trip” was a curriculum-based study of language arts and social studies that provided students with a greater appreciation and understanding of the time period, according to a district announcement. “After a year of learning and discovering information [...]
Top of the World Elementary students Lela and Logan McCarroll kicked off TOW’s fourth annual Book Swap with their generous donation, carting three full suitcases to school. Showing their support for reading, the students at TOW swapped over 2,000 books and donated an additional 1,000 books to the Laguna Beach Literacy Project. This year, the [...]
The public is invited to enjoy the Thurston Middle School and Laguna Beach High School spring concerts on Wednesday and Thursday, June 8 and 9, which will be held in the LBHS Artists’ Theatre. The concerts, under the direction of teachers Jeremy Chung, Roger Shew and Roxanna Ward, will feature multiple instrumental ensembles and vocalists. [...]
Police Use Taser to Subdue Assault Suspect
An assault involving three men escalated into a struggle with Laguna Beach police, who ultimately deployed a taser twice to subdue the younger combative suspect in the 300 block of Cozumel around 1:15 a.m. Friday, May 10, police said. Police ultimately arrested Laguna Beach resident Sergio Gabriel Borgognone, 51, for allegedly resisting arrest and his [...]
