HIGHTSTOWN: Curriculum fair returns after seven-year hiatus

By Doug Carman, Staff Writer
   HIGHTSTOWN — A game of pool might be a way for a hustler to make an easy buck, but Hightstown High School students Michael Barton, Anisha Mallampalli and Anindita Das showed that it’s just another way to look at their geometry studies.
   ”You’re showing people angles to apply to pool. We teach them how to play and we teach them to apply it to a real game,” Michael said, emphasizing that his game improved when he applied geometry to his shots.
   The students’ studies were put on display last week at the East Windsor Regional School District’s curriculum fair, a once-annual event that restarted April 14 after a lull of seven years. Assistant Superintendent Debbie Feaster said the fair was intended to give the “chance for our students to shine, to look at their work.”
   Though she was principal at Perry L. Drew Elementary School when the curriculum fair was discontinued, Ms. Feaster said the fair, which drew nearly 1,000 students and parents, might have been too colossal an event for the school staff to handle at the time.
   But this school year, it was on.
   ”The district is able to bring back the curriculum fair this year due to the tremendous effort and dedication from all staff, including teachers, secretaries, clerks, custodians, maintenance, computer technicians, supervisors and administrators,” Ms. Feaster said. “This has been a collaborative effort to showcase to the community many of the exciting educational opportunities that exist right in their own backyard.”
   Each hallway in the high school’s main building, along with the cafeteria, gymnasium and several classrooms, became showrooms for students of all six district schools.
   In one part of the gym, Hightstown junior John Woodill and the rest of the high school’s robotics team tended to a large robot with a plastic arm designed to hang inflatable pool tubes on 9-foot-high mounts. He and his team had only six weeks to build the robot from scratch for a competition in Trenton, where they garnered second place. The students have since become semifinalists at a competition in Washington, D.C.
   ”Not only do you learn how to build a robot, you learn how to program it,” John said of the work on the machine. “This takes six weeks to build … keep fixing, remodifying … the process doesn’t stop.”
   Substitute teacher Jenny Horowitz and her mother, Jill Horowitz, the manager of EWRSD’s community services office, manned one of the busiest tables as they pressed buttons for a seemingly infinite line of kindergartners. Jokingly calling their button maker the “hottest ticket in town” at the fair, Jenny Horowitz quickly took the children’s drawings and transformed them into buttons using the machine press.
   Parents enjoyed watching their children participate in the exhibitions and science displays. Prakash Biradar focused on his son, Perry L. Drew Elementary School fourth-grader Amitej Biradar, as his arms flew into a blur of action during a cup-stacking competition.
   ”It’s good. Excellent … the exhibitions and the science displays,” Mr. Biradar said, momentarily stopping to see Amitej slam down his last blue cup on the pyramid. “Excellent.”