Tabor students were released for Spring Break on Thursday, March 7, and many of them were off to adventures near and far.
Four groups of students are heading abroad – three are on cultural exchanges, while one is on a research trip. The cultural exchanges include a group in Beijing, China, and another in Copenhagen, Denmark, to visit Tabor’s partner schools there for homestays and class visits. The third group is engaging in a drama exchange with a boarding school in England where the students will stay at the school while sharing their show with the students, as well as a few other schools in the U.K. They will spend some time in London before heading home.
Tabor’s marine science student research group is off with hopes to reconstruct an area of coral reef in San Salvador, Bahamas. The team of faculty and students will be expanding on the school’s 16-year research project on coral reefs in the Caribbean. This year they will be using their proven research methods to evaluate coral communities, and then will do some genetic testing to find gene-resistant species to a common disease that is killing off Elkhorn and Staghorn coral in the Caribbean. The students will take fragments from the healthy coral to build coral fragment trees, which they will leave to grow underwater. Next year when they return, the students hope to secure the more mature coral to the seabed and rebuild a new healthy reef community. This is a brand new and exciting project for Tabor marine science.
More marine science research will be taking place in Woods Hole, where Tabor students are participating in a High School Discovery Course with Marine Biological Laboratory. MBL scientists are the teachers, exposing the students to their research, equipment, and research methods. This is an incredible opportunity in one of the world’s best research facilities.
Finally, the girls’ and boys’ lacrosse, golf, and crew teams, as well as the boys’ baseball team, will be heading south for some training time, taking advantage of the warm weather and access to other high school and college teams for some great competition. With New England pretty snowed in, these trips offer a nice bonding opportunity, as well as good preparation in both skill development and conditioning for the spring sports season, which opens when the students return on March 27.