OUR GRAY HAWK FAMILY works together to help students feel safe, loved, and inspired so they can be empowered learners and engaged citizens.

We had a wonderful response to OUR first Talent Show sign up. We will celebrate OUR talented Gray Hawks on Thursday, March 3 at 6:00 pm at the high school. We will be sure to send out more information for everyone if you and your family would like to come watch and enjoy time together as a community.

February is the start of Black History Month. This week we will focus on some African Americans that you might not know about and some books that tell powerful stories. Our featured story is Charlie Takes His Shot: How Charlie Sifford Broke the Color Barrier in Golf by Nancy Churnin.

Charlie Sifford loved golf, but in the 1930's only white people were allowed to play in the Professional Golf Association. Sifford had won plenty of Black tournaments, but he was determined to break the color barrier in the PGA. In 1960 he did, only to face discrimination from hotels that wouldn’t rent him rooms and clubs that wouldn’t let him use the same locker as the white players. But Sifford kept playing, becoming the first Black golfer to win a PGA tournament and eventually ranking among the greats in golf.

As a part of our commitment to ensuring that our students are exposed to the contributions of people of color and from different backgrounds, we kicked off this past week by giving daily clues to a famous person from history that has made our world a better place. This past week, the students heard the following clues:

• Monday: I was born September 2, 1948 in Boston, Massachusetts. I was the oldest of five children and I graduated from high school in 1966. I then went on to college where I studied American History and Education.

• Tuesday: In 1978 I began my career as a high school teacher. Three years later, the first space shuttle circled the Earth and I made sure that my students paid attention to this historic moment in history. In 1984, President Ronald Reagan announced a new program called the Teacher in Space Project.

• Wednesday: I wanted to be the first private citizen in space so I applied to be a part of the Teacher in Space Project. There were over 11,000 applicants and Vice President George H.W. Bush announced that I had been selected to be the “first private citizen passenger in the history of space flight.”

• Thursday: I was very excited to be chosen for the Teacher in Space project and saw it as an incredible way to represent my community and teachers worldwide. I knew that that this would be a great way for my kids to better understand space and how NASA works. I trained very hard and my mission was originally scheduled to blast off on January 22, 1986 but there were several delays due to problems with weather and the shuttle itself.

• Friday: On January 28, 1986 we were finally given the go ahead for launch. The countdown began and we blasted off. Two minutes into the flight there was a catastrophic failure and the space shuttle exploded. Everyone on the shuttle died. After my death I received the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, and a planetarium, as well as an asteroid and a crater on the moon were named after me. There is even an elementary school here in our city named after me.

In doing some research for an upcoming presentation I dug up this video from The Trauma Foundation that gives a basic introduction and overview of how trauma and chronic stress affects our nervous system and how those effects impact our health and well-being.

While the video is a bit longer than I usually place in The Community Nest, it explains so much about the autonomic nervous system and the role the ANS plays in our lives. I will use this as a springboard for the next few weeks to share more information about the autonomic nervous system and ways that we can stimulate our vagus nerve and teach our students to do the same to aid in self regulation.