Lower School

The Middle School Junior Beta Induction ceremony took place on the lawn this year and included just the 55 members but was streamed live to parents. Beta President Collins Barton and faculty sponsor Maggie Masferrer along with Barbara Rubio-Gomez and student musicians took part in the program. Students in Jr. Beta must be service-minded and have a qualifying GPA to apply.

Students in Miss Parisi’s Community Outreach Through the Arts (COTA) class participated in a Glow Fun Run this fall. All proceeds from the run benefit Shands Children’s Hospital.

COTA challenges students to examine their community and its needs, then address those needs through arts initiatives. Students collaborate to create art projects that directly and positively impact both the Maclay and Tallahassee communities.

Middle School students had a virtual meeting with Astronaut Terry Virts to discuss his new book, How to Astronaut - An Insider’s Guide to Leaving Planet Earth. Virts is one of only four astronauts in history to have piloted a space shuttle, flown a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, performed spacewalks, and commanded the International Space Station. The virtual meeting was made possible by Tallahassee’s independent bookstore, The Midtown Reader.

The Middle School Student Astronaut team is focusing their scientific research on increasing an astronaut’s lung capacity while practicing for the competition at Kennedy Space Center they qualified for earlier this year. The team practices in the Computer Science, Robotics, & Engineering lab in the Beck Family Research Center under the direction of faculty sponsor Cameron Barton.

Middle School students Caroline Couch and Belen Rambana have been working on data collection for their science fair experiment with faculty members Ariel Evans and Rachel Paul. Their work is being done in the Marie E. Krafft Biomedical & Applied Student Research Lab in the Beck Family Research Center which has dedicated laboratory space for student research.