Harker’s Office of Communication recently earned an Award of Distinction in the annual Videographer Awards competition for their video on the Harker Research Symposium. The video was part of an extended online multimedia piece entitled, “A Decade of Wonder,” about the Harker Research Symposium, which has been held since 2006. Other Award of Distinction winners in this annual contest included Comcast, Bell Helicopters, Bayer Healthcare, Brigham Young University, Dell Computers and University of Massachusetts. Here is a direct link so you can watch full screen.
As of the last week in July, the athletic center and performing arts center construction site is sporting two deep holes, and plenty of work went on before they were dug.
“Over the past month we have been putting in all the underground infrastructure and that is complete,” said Mike Bassoni, Harker’s facility director. “We have our new storm lines to control storm water, our new sewer lines and many of our electric and low voltage duct banks in the ground. Those are all mapped by GPS. We can dig down to within an inch and find these pipes, the path they’re traveling and the depth they are in the ground. So if we have to find them later or alter them or add to the system, we know exactly where they are.”
Following installation of underground infrastructure, the whole site was carefully graded using GPS-directed graders which allow accuracy in leveling to within 1 inch, Bassoni noted. As soon as the grading was finished for the gym site, excavation began.
The athletic center excavation was started first and, for several days in mid-July, an unending stream of dirt haulers wound through the construction site, each collecting its load of dirt from the Caterpillar hydraulic excavator and hauling it off. The excavator moves about 135 cubic feet of dirt with every shovelful and the trucks haul away 3-5 shovelfuls each, depending on their capacity. About 1,900 truckloads of dirt will leave the construction site in the end.
The performing arts excavation is still in progress and the resulting huge pile of dirt will be trucked off campus when summer camps wrap up. The athletic center excavation is already having its earthen walls stabilized with a sprayed-on cement compound.
The basements are critical components in both buildings, noted Bassoni. The athletic center basement will be home to the playing courts, bleachers, locker rooms and guest team rooms. The theater basement will be home to the orchestra pit, below-stage storage areas, and dressing and equipment rooms. Both basements will house heating and air conditioning equipment, but the excavations also hold the main performance areas. “In the gymnasium, you’ll be walking into a promenade at the top of the seating which will cascade to the playing floor 14 feet below entry level,” said Bassoni.
“In the theater, again, you’ll walk into the top of the seating on the main floor and the seating will cascade about a dozen feet to the theater floor in front of the stage,” he added. “Also, underneath the stage, you’ll have trapdoors, an orchestra pit, a grand piano storage area with hydraulics to bring that to the grade level, and a very large mechanical system that will provide heating and cooling into the acting space with absolutely no sense of sound.
“Even when the theater goes to complete black you will not be able to hear the mechanical system running during an intermission or a pause in the acting. So, that’s why we’re creating these basement areas: it’s energy efficient because the earth keeps conditioned air much more stable so you are not using a lot of additional energy for heating and cooling,” Bassoni explained.
Energy efficiency runs deep in the double project. “Both buildings are going to achieve LEED Gold certification similar to that that Nichols Hall achieved in 2009,” said Bassoni. “All of the exterior windows are of a very high efficiency level so that they will keep heating and cooling within the building. The gymnasium will have a 140-kilowatt photovoltaic or solar electric system to keep both buildings about 25 percent off the grid.”
But before all that can be implemented, the basements need to be finished and the site arranged for drop-off access.
Now, in late July, concrete stabilization is already being poured for the athletic center. Once the stabilization is complete in the athletic center basement, the underground plumbing and electrical conduits will be installed, said Bassoni. “Finally, the concrete slab that will create the basement floor will be poured,” he said. “That will happen in late September or early October. We’re moving along at a really fast clip, 10-12 hours per day on excavations so the bulk can be finished by the time school starts.”
At this point, the perimeter around the excavations has been smoothed out and tamped down so that construction traffic can get around the site safely, and part of that access will remain in use for parent drop-off when school starts.
The performing arts center excavation will finish up about mid-August, and stabilization of the gym basement will finish up about the same time. The PA basement does not require a stabilization process as the excavation is utilizing a “lay-back process” which greatly reduces shoring of the excavated sidewalls during construction. The foundation cement pours are slated to begin about mid-September. The entire site will be groomed for the opening of classes in the first weeks of August so, although it might be a bit dusty, student drop-off and pickup will be ready for the start of the school year. Watch for our monthly report on construction project and for updates in Facebook, Instagram and Twitter!
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
The speech and debate team had some outstanding success in June! The upper school team was represented by Nikhil Dharmaraj, rising sophomore, at the National Speech & Debate Association championship in Salt Lake City, Utah, June 12-17. The tournament is the most competitive national championship for individual speaking events, which are his specialty.
Dharmaraj was one of 250 students in the country to qualify in original oratory (out of thousands who tried to qualify). He made it to the quarterfinals, ranking him 28th in the nation as a ninth grader. His topic was how we need to be better about avoiding the “sunk cost” fallacy or why it is better to admit mistakes and move on than to keep pouring resources into failed strategies based on bad decisions.
During the same week, the middle school team was represented by a large group at the National Junior Forensic League Tournament, also in Salt Lake City, June 14-17. The biggest news from NJFL was that Harker won the top Overall School of Excellence Award for the fifth consecutive year!
A detailed breakdown of individual accomplishments at the NJFL is below. All grades listed are for the 2016-17 school year:
Original oratory
Avi Gulati, grade 9, 2nd place
Arusha Patil, grade 8, 6th place
Public Forum Debate
Jeremy Ding and Kenneth Liou, both grade 9, double octofinalists
Lincoln-Douglas Debate
Sachin Shah, grade 9, finalist (2nd place)
Akshay Manglik, grade 8, quarterfinalist
Aditi Vinod, grade 8, octofinalist
Policy Debate
Jai Bahri, grade 9 and Jason Lin, grade 8, semifinalists
Andy Lee, grade 8 and Deven Shah, grade 7, quarterfinalists
Dramatic Interpretation
Nikki Solanki, grade 9, 9th place
Storytelling
Avi Gulati, grade 9, 6th place
Impromptu
Avi Gulati, grade 9, 2nd place
Prose Interpretation
Nikki Solanki, grade 9, 6th place
The coaches were incredibly proud of all of our students. They represented Harker very well as strong competitors and excellent community citizens. Recent graduates Karen Qi, Zarek Drozda and Panny Shan, all Class of 2016, came along to coach the middle school students. “Harker has a reputation for being smart, well spoken and gracious whether we win or lose, and that image is a result of how our students conduct themselves at every tournament,” noted Jenny Alme, department chair of communication studies.
The Harker DECA officer team, 15 strong, attended the DECA Emerging Leader Summit (ELS) at the Hilton San Francisco Financial District in early July to partake in leadership workshops and develop as a team. Officers from all over the country traveled to San Francisco for leadership training, networking opportunities and keynote speakers.
The group attended several workshops on communication, professional behavior, fundraising and chapter development. The students also attended an etiquette luncheon, took a bus tour of the city and held a chapter dinner.
“ELS was a good opportunity for the officer team to reconnect and get stuff ready and planned for DECA Launch,” co-CEO Alexis Gauba, grade 12, said. “It was also an opportunity for the officer team to bond and have some fun together, and it was definitely valuable that the teams had some designated team time.”
The team is now preparing for DECA Launch, which will happen Aug. 15-16.
Harker DECA is an international competitive business organization that prepares emerging leaders and entrepreneurs in four fields of business: marketing, finance, hospitality and management. Harker’s DECA chapter integrates classroom instruction, applies learning, connects to business and promotes competition so that the next generation will be academically prepared, community oriented, professionally responsible and experienced leaders.
Four members of Harker’s girls lacrosse team were recently named Academic All-Americans by TopLaxRecruits.com. Taylor Iantosca, Aditi Maheshwari, Alayna Richmond and Priyanka Taneja, all rising seniors, earned the title after an impressive season on the field and in the classroom.
Ameek Singh ’16 was recently named one of five Bay Area-based summer interns in the Bank of America Student Leaders program. This paid opportunity develops real-world work and leadership skills through hands-on experience at a local nonprofit organization. Singh’s internship will take place at Junior Achievement, which helps students in grades K-12 with career readiness and entrepreneurship.
Singh and more than 200 other Student Leaders from across the country also were invited to attend the Student Leaders Summit in Washington, D.C., from July 10-15. There, the students discussed how to increase diversity and inclusiveness as well as how to positively impact communities through cross-sector collaboration.
San Jose Mercury News – June 22, 2016: Harker volleyball coach Mike Aitken, rising seniors Andrew Gu and Ray Song, and rising sophomores Charlie Molin and Chris Gong are noted for winning Coach of the Year, Juniors of the Year and Freshmen of the Year, respectively, in the Santa Clara Valley Athletic League’s El Camino Division.
San Jose Mercury News – June 22, 2016: 2016 graduate Vineet Kosaraju is mentioned in this story about MathAndCoding, an organization he co-founded with his friend, Nikhil Cheerla, a rising senior at Monta Vista High School.
San Jose Councilman Chappie Jones’ Blog: The councilman’s blog details how Harker helped with the resurfacing of Rebecca Way, which is located near the middle school campus.
San Jose Mercury News – June 9, 2016: Rising senior Niki Iyer’s third-place finish at the CIF state track and field meet is featured in this roundup of the event.
San Jose Mercury News – June 7, 2016: Model United Nations coach Carol Green is mentioned for being awarded a Diamond Coach Award from the National Speech & Debate Association’s Honor Society.
San Jose Mercury News – June 1, 2016: Rising sophomore Rithvik Panchapakesan is featured in a story about being one of the country’s 66 winners in the H&R Block Budget Challenge.
Harker rising third grader Anika Rajaram, an avid chess player, was recently invited to represent the United States at the 2016 World Cadets Chess Championships, to be held in October in the Georgian city of Batumi. Rajaram has had a string of successes at recent tournaments, including the Susan Polgar Foundation World K-2 girls championship, where she earned a perfect score. At the Susan Polgar Foundation National Open, Rajaram took second place among girls in her age group. She tied for second place at the Renaissance Knights Chess Foundation’s All-Girls Nationals in the under 8 category. Consistently ranked among the top 100 of players in her age group nationwide, as of press time Rajaram was the top-ranked player in the country under the age of 8.
Following an extensive multiyear effort across the Harker community, The Harker School has now been recognized by as a Certified Green Business by the Bay Area Green Business Program. In addition to being a major sustainability goal, fulfilling the requirements for certification also is expected to reduce costs in a variety of ways.
“Aside from the primary goals of being a more environmentally sustainable institution and meeting Harker’s standard of modeling and teaching sustainability through our actions, CGB provides a report card,” said Jeff Sutton, Harker science teacher and a member of Harker’s Green Committee. “This report card provides positive feedback as to how much savings, both fiscal and in the reduction of our impact on the environment, the actions are generating. These numbers are estimates but still provide encouragement for continuance in the program.”
The effort to become a Certified Green Business began in late 2012, when the newly formed Green Committee was searching for a way to advance Harker’s sustainability goals. “[Harker head of school] Chris Nikoloff began the search for a tool to implement to gain better understanding of sustainability at Harker, including knowing what Harker was doing to be stewards of resources and looking for ways to improve the overall sustainability of the operation of the school,” Sutton said. “The CGB application provided an excellent framework because it was so comprehensive and very objective in the tasks needed to achieve CGB status.”
Preparation for the application process began in 2013 and lasted through the year. Applications for all four of Harker’s campuses were submitted in May 2014, and inspectors from Santa Clara County visited in June and noted what needed to be done to qualify for the certification.
The schoolwide effort to become certified lasted for the next two years, with key projects and initiatives occurring on all campuses. Shipping/receiving manager Bob Benge and business manager Clif Wilcox devised a more sustainable policy for school purchases. Stephen Martin, executive director of food services, worked with the Harker kitchen staff to acquire food products that had been sustainably produced, in addition to using more environmentally friendly paper products and discontinuing the use of polystyrene. Thanks to transportation supervisor Heather Armada, all of Harker’s vehicles now use recycled oil. Other projects included spearheading the use of Energy Star-rated electronics, using recycled paper for photocopying, examining the use of LED lighting and much more.
Harker’s Green Business certification is up for renewal in three years, and Sutton is confident that the school will maintain its dedication to sustainability. “As an institution of education, it is awesome to see Harker modeling ways to improve its sustainability in its relationship with the environment,” he said.
It’s summer break for Harker students, but two Eagle athletes are still competing at a high level.
This past season, Niki Iyer, grade 12, was the WBAL and CCS champion in the 3200-meter run, before finishing third in state. This past week she added another title to her impressive resume. On Saturday, Iyer won the Junior Olympic 17-18-year-old 3000m in Sacramento. The win qualifies her for the National Junior Olympic Track & Field Championships in July, also in Sacramento. Congrats and good luck, Niki!
Davis Dunaway, grade 12, was a WBAL champion in the pole vault and finished second in the 300m hurdles to earn a ticket to CCS last year. This weekend he will compete in his first decathlon. Dunaway will participate in the 100m, 110m hurdles, 400m, 1500m, shotput, high jump, long jump, discus, pole vault and javelin. Good luck, Davis!