Concurrent with the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, Greg Lawson, assistant head of school, student affairs, was named Harker’s first sustainability coordinator.
Lawson’s new responsibilities include assessing and coordinating support for environmental initiatives generated by the Harker Sustainability Committee, as well as those suggested by the Harker community, including faculty, staff, students and parents.
“Greg will ensure that all ideas regarding Harker’s ecological footprint see due consideration,” said Chris Nikoloff, head of school. “He will facilitate a handshake between operations and the rest of the school on important green efforts.”
The appointment “is the pinnacle of the green timeline,” according to Jeff Sutton, Sustainability Committee co-chair and upper school science teacher. “We have been hoping for the creation of such a position.”
Sutton adds that Harker’s recognition as a Certified Green Business by the Bay Area Green Business Program in June 2016 helped lay the groundwork for the new appointment. “Becoming certified provided concrete actions that Harker can achieve to reduce its impact on the environment while saving money,” he said.
Harker’s environmental efforts thus far have resulted in significant savings. According to the California Green Business Program, Harker’s efforts have diverted more than a million pounds of solid waste from landfills since 2012, representing a savings of more than $73,000. Similarly, the Harker community has saved nearly 680,000 kilowatt hours of energy over the same period, banking an additional $68,000. Further coordination is predicted to result in even greater savings.
The appointment demonstrates that environmentally responsible behavior “is not simply the topic-of-the-month,” said Lawson. “We are serious about being a sustainable and green organization to the degree that we can within our operating parameters, and want to have a support system that reflects and finds ways to achieve that.”
“We are on the cusp of some very exciting advances in California, regarding the possibilities for living and working in an environmentally sustainable way,” said Kate Schafer, co-chair of the Sustainability Committee, which includes 18 faculty and staff from all four Harker campuses. “With this new position and the faculty committee working in parallel, we have the opportunity here at Harker to not just teach about sustainability but to truly model what an exemplary institution can accomplish,” she said.
Coordinating efforts will not always be easy, said Lawson, “but … the bigger the challenge, the bigger the potential reward!” As part of his duties, Lawson will attend bimonthly meetings of the Sustainability Committee, and he is currently working with the committee to create an online site in Harker’s portal to record green suggestions from the community and provide information regarding the status of these suggestions.
The annual Parent Development Council luncheon was again held at the home of Melinda Gonzales, managing director of advancement. About 50 members of the council attended the lunch, which served to thank these dedicated parents for all of their hard work. The event, catered by Luna Mexican Kitchen, was a delightful interlude as the school year winds up!
The Harker Girls Summer Lacrosse Camp, a new offering in this year’s summer program, promises to be a great opportunity for girls to learn and fine-tune their skills in this increasingly popular sport.
This camp is designed for a wide range of experience levels, from beginner to advanced. It will focus on helping players build confidence, improve their lacrosse knowledge, develop key skills and instill solid field strategy. Skills that will be stressed include footwork, stickwork, shooting, dodging, teamwork and defensive concepts. Small-sided games will be played to demonstrate and practice these skills and for just plain fun!
Harker girls lacrosse head coach Alyssa Dunlap will act as instructor along with other coaches and players with division I collegiate backgrounds. Dunlap’s credentials reach as far back as her time in high school, where she was instrumental in helping her team win three consecutive Pennsylvania State Championships and was twice named High School All-American. While at Vanderbilt University, she was selected for the All-West Region team by the Intercollegiate Women’s Lacrosse Coaches Association and named to the All-American Lacrosse Conference first team. Prior to joining Harker, Dunlap coached at Stanford University and the Treelax Lacrosse Club.
The Harker Girls Summer Lacrosse Camp is being offered in two sessions, each for different grade levels. The first session, for grades 6-12, will run July 17-20, and the second session, for grades 3-5, will run July 31-Aug. 3. This camp will be held at The Harker School’s upper campus.
For more info and register for this camp and other summer offerings, please visit the Harker Summer website.
The first basketball hoops are in place in the new athletic center as final assembly has begun. “Our wood guy will be out next week to check flatness of the floor and do a moisture test on the concrete,” said Matt McKinley, senior project engineer for Devcon. From the ground up, a gym is emerging.
A vapor barrier will be installed between the concrete and the wood floor, but the concrete must first cure sufficiently so that the wood won’t be affected. Harker has opted to install a floor that will take a heavier load than normal so it can keep a power lift in the gym to service lights and the athletic equipment if necessary, McKinley noted.
First things first: final sealing of the building is underway. The “leave-out bay,” the huge opening in the south wall used to bring in big fixtures and take out heavy construction equipment, has already been framed over. “We are closing that out so we can get the whole exterior tuned up and done,” said McKinley. Devcon will leave one of the four lifts still in use for Harker and remove the remaining lifts using a temporary overhead crane, an interesting feat of engineering.
The entire gym has been drywalled, and drywall is going up in all the offices on the gym level, as well as the training and locker rooms on both levels. Tectum acoustic panels are stacked and awaiting installation on the gym walls (for more on how the athletic center interior components are tailored to function throughout, see Harker News). The large images of athletes that will adorn the south wall have been chosen and are in production.
Moving up the walls, the east viewing area, located off of the second floor workout room near the performing arts center, is framed in and ready to be finished. It will protrude a bit from the wall, making the whole gym visible. The north viewing area, nearest the administration building, is also ready to be completed. This platform will be reserved for those in wheelchairs or otherwise needing easy access, with the elevator nearby to allow access to the gym floor level. This viewing area will have some nice features, with wood ceiling panels. “It is basically an acoustical ceiling,” said McKinley. “It does have acoustical values for limiting sound transfer.”
The north viewing area also will feature “maple panels on the facades,” McKinley said, pointing to the vertical surfaces, “here and on the returns,” around the sides. The rough angle-iron and steel cable rails now keeping workers safe will be replaced by stainless steel rails with glass guard rails.
Continuing on up, the basketball hoops are just the first of the fixtures going on the ceiling. Nets and other equipment also will rise for storage near the ceiling after use, and there will be a dividing curtain to split the gym for multiple uses. That work is taking place the first week of May.
The following week, the electric curtains for the long banks of windows will be installed, said McKinley. All wiring for the athletic equipment, curtain and shades is in, ready to be hooked up. The control panels for all the equipment will be located near the coaches’ offices.
Finally, way up at the top, off to the sides along the walls, will be the ventilation ducts. The huge tube sections, 3 feet in diameter and 20 feet long, lay about the gym floor, having been painted earlier in the week. The straps that will hold the ducts in place already hang from the ceiling. It’s fun to think these great tubes will hang, unnoticed for the most part, along the walls for many years, as they quietly add to the ambiance created by the activity and shouts of athletes and the cheers of spectators in the new athletic center.
Ashvin Swaminathan ’13 was just awarded a Soros Fellowship for New Americans.
The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans honors the contributions of immigrants and children of immigrants to the United States. Each year, the program provides funding for graduate studies for 30 immigrants and children of immigrants “who are poised to make significant contributions to U.S. society, culture or their academic field,” according to the website, which goes on to note that each fellow receives up to $90,000 in financial support over two years.
Swaminathan, a senior at Harvard, is graduating in May with degrees in mathematics and physics. In the fall, he will start his graduate studies in mathematics at Princeton. Other awardees include a jazz trumpeter at The Juilliard School, a printmaker at Yale and a philosophy major at Columbia. Swaminathan was valedictorian for his graduating class at Harker and earned a number of distinctions while still in high school, including being named a semifinalist in the Intel Science Talent Search (now the Regeneron Science Talent Search) and a John Near Scholar Endowment recipient. Amazing work, Ashvin! Best wishes for a continued great career! The photo is from the 2013 Near-Mitra Endowment reception.
Update: Here is the playlist of videos of speakers at the Harker Research Symposium. Topics ranged from AI to VR/ML to rockets! Students who were finalists in various science contests presented their research and the panel discussion was an informational presentation of the scientific research opportunities at Harker, geared towards younger students who are considering pursuing research in the near future. Enjoy!
Harker’s large community of science enthusiasts gathered at the upper school campus on April 15 for the 2017 Harker Research Symposium. Early arrivals packed the Nichols Hall auditorium for a talk by leading artificial intelligence expert Fei-Fei Li, who spoke about advancements in developing visual intelligence for computers.
Attendees then filled the Nichols Hall atrium, examining the many corporate exhibits, from companies including Google, IBM, Xilinx, Nvidia and Titanium Falcon. They later made their way to the quad for the lunchtime chemistry magic show, staged by Andrew Irvine, who awed the crowd with several spectacular chemical reactions.
This year’s alumni speaker was Evan Maynard ’09, who now works at Blue Origin as a propulsion development engineer. Maynard discussed his current work in making spaceflight more affordable, as well as the development of reusable rockets.
Throughout the day, Harker students presented their work at breakout sessions, detailing research they had done in a variety of scientific fields, including astronomy, medicine and climatology. At the upper school gym, visitors listened attentively to the many middle school students who gave poster presentations.
The afternoon keynote was delivered by Achin Bhowmik, vice president and general manager of Intel’s perceptual computing group. His talk covered technological advancements that have enabled machines to more closely sense and interact with the world around them.
This year’s symposium also included three very special student talks by Regeneron Science Talent Search finalists Evani Radiya-Dixit, Arjun Subramaniam and Manan Shah, all grade 12. The students shared specifics of the research that earned them their impressive accolades.
Following their presentations, Radiya-Dixit, Subramaniam and Shah were part of a panel discussion that included science department chair Anita Chetty, physics teacher Chris Spenner, juniors Amy Jin and Rajiv Movva and senior Sandip Nirmel. The panelists discussed Harker’s many opportunities for science research, before bringing the event to a close.
Lower, middle and upper school vocalists performed together at this year’s United Voices concert, held March 16 at the Blackford Theater. The groups featured included the grades 4-5 Bucknall Choir, the grade 6 choir Dynamics, the grades 7-8 choir Vivace and the upper school’s show choir Downbeat. As in previous years, all participants appeared on stage for the finale, a performance of Rollo Dilworth’s “Everlasting Melody.”
The athletic center is rapidly coming together! With exterior walls and roof nearly complete, serious work has started inside. The gym floor itself will be the subject of another construction update when it goes in, but in the meantime, there are a dozen workers upholstering interior spaces.
There is still a huge opening in the east wall to allow material like the pallets of sheet rock and flooring to be loaded into the gym, and heavy equipment to be removed as it is finished with, but in just a couple of weeks the building will be sealed and final interior appointments installed. At this point, everything not affected by the weather is being bolted, glued or welded into place.
The locker rooms, coaches’ area and workout rooms are forests of light gauge metal studs waiting for drywall, which can’t go in quite yet – the building has to be “dried in” (watertight) first so, in case of rain, the drywall does not get damp. The building will be dried in by early April and, at that point, “tenant improvements” will begin in earnest. Interior walls will have acoustical insulation installed and drywall will be hung, taped and painted.
But all wall coverings are not created equal! While the normal interior drywall that will cover 95 percent of the non-gym area walls will be smooth and must be kept dry, there are two other kinds of wall covering used.
Regular drywall will be used for offices, locker rooms and other auxiliary rooms but, for the playing area itself, special acoustical paneling that “looks like it has ramen on it,” will cover the drywall, said Matt McKinley, senior project engineer. These Tectum panels will keep the noise under control during the exciting games.
The third wall covering, called DensGlass, is used only in limited interior areas, specifically, the basement, where utility rooms had to be drywalled prior to drying in so heavy junction boxes and other electrical equipment could be installed while exterior walls were still open. This special drywall resists moisture without being entirely waterproof, so is okay to hang prior to drying in – the rooms stay dry even if it is raining outside and there is high humidity due to the building being partially open to the elements.
Special reinforcing will be run behind drywall to allow for the mounting of fixtures. For the bleacher area, blocks of wood 6 inches by 8 inches will be anchored in the north wall, and the bleachers will bolt to the blocks. Light-gauge sheet metal will be installed behind drywall in other areas of the building to support fixtures mounted to the wall.
Flooring
With the exception of the playing floor, most of the athletic center will have polished concrete floors. Polished concrete keeps costs down and makes for a long-lasting, easy-to-maintain surface. Coaches’ offices will have linoleum flooring or carpet, while all locker rooms and other wet rooms, like the hydro-therapy room, will have ceramic tile; all good, solid, durable floor coverings. Stairways are of cast concrete, with some having a rubber coating for safety.
One of the less glamorous finishing jobs is making sure pipe, conduits and ducts all line up and don’t run into each other. Devcon, using the architect’s plans, worked up a three-dimensional digital model using computer-assisted design software. The model helps the construction company manage each set of utilities and scan for problem areas. This process is called building information modeling (BIM).
“We model all of the duct work, all of the pipes, all of the steel … everything we do to see if there are any conflicts,” said McKinley, “and run a clash detection so you can see if a pipe is running into a duct, and so on.” He pointed out where a 4-inch water pipe ran through a hole cut through an 18-inch steel support beam. Thanks to the BIM, “we knew they were going to have to bore through that steel beam to allow that pipe to pass through it.
“It used to take longer in the field,” said McKinley, when workers would discover a conflict and have to resolve it before continuing. Now the conflicts can be predicted and work carried forward quickly. “Once you have the model, everyone knows how to build it as soon as they get out here,” he said. “You still run into problems, but the 3-D modeling really helps speed the process.”
Other Points of Interest
There are some nice features coming to light as the open areas are framed in, such as the fitness room in the southeast corner (on the freeway side, near the new performing arts center), where a 12-foot by 6-foot mirror will slide to one side to allow a birdseye view of the playing floor below.
Not yet installed are all of the trappings of a state-of-the-art athletic center and, when they are installed, many pieces will be on the ceiling. Volleyball nets, basketball hoops and other P.E. equipment will be fastened to the ceiling and lowered into place for use, then lifted to clear the area for the next activity.
Decorations will include two 20-foot-square banners opposite the bleachers featuring a male and female athlete. There will be a giant eagle on the gym floor, but details are still being worked out as the design has to mesh with all the lines for the various playing courts that will be painted on the floor.
From McKinley’s point of view, things are starting to get exciting. The last 20 percent of a project takes 80 percent of the work, he noted. “We’re trying to finish up in three months,” he said. “It is always a scramble at the end, but the project team is all working hard and on track to turn the gym over this summer.”
Beginning in June 2016 Harker launched two new state-of-the art building projects on the upper school campus, the result of a $45M capital campaign. The 33,000 square-foot athletic center, opening August 2017, features a 12,000 sq.-ft. gym, athletic training room with advanced hydrotherapy unit, and spacious team rooms. The Rothschild Performing Arts Center, opening spring of 2018, features a 450-seat theater with fly loft and hydraulic orchestra pit, a state of the art scene shop, vocal, instrumental, theater/musical theater classrooms and dressing rooms. For more information visit the news and video links below or contact communications@harker.org
Harker earned the top spot in a survey of SAT scores at regional high schools, according to a report published this week by the San Francisco Business Times, based on data from Niche, a school rating site. The report notes that out of 72 private high schools in the Bay Area, the top 10 all have SAT scores averaging above 1350 out of a possible 1600. The report notes, “The highest average SAT score for the schools surveyed was 1480, a jump of 50 points from the highest scoring public high school in the Bay Area.” At 1480, Harker had the highest average among private schools, according to the report. Here is the full article.
During the third week of January, 22 students from the Shanghai World Foreign Language Academy visited Harker as part of an annual exchange program with the school, which has existed for more than 20 years.
The students arrived on the morning of Saturday, Jan. 14, and met up with their homestays. The WFLA chaperones enjoyed a day of sightseeing in San Francisco courtesy of technical theater teacher Paul Vallerga. The following day, grade 3 department chair Kathy Ferretti shuttled the chaperones to Monterey and Gilroy, and on Monday, lower school English department chair Kate Shanahan took them shopping in the San Jose area.
On their first day at Harker, the students observed classes with their buddies, made crafts in the middle school’s innovation lab and learned how to play American football. The next day, they toured Stanford University and visited the campus’s Cantor Arts Center. Thursday’s cooking class was especially fun for the students, who “had a great time making sloppy Joes, deviled eggs, clam chowder and apple pie,” said Jennifer Walrod, global education director.
Friday was packed with activity, as the WFLA students enjoyed a Chinese paper-cutting activity with lower school students, then headed to Cesar Chavez Park in downtown San Jose to enjoy a bag lunch before exploring the Tech Museum of Innovation. That afternoon, they returned to the middle school for a farewell party, where they and their buddies had great fun using the photo booth and making sundaes.
Just before boarding their flight home on Saturday, Jan. 21, the WFLA students shared an emotional farewell with their Harker buddies.