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At 3:20pm on March 23rd all of BHSEC was called to the auditorium for a special assembly. After several minutes of confusion, Principal Ray Peterson took the stage. In a brief but emotional speech, he announced his retirement from the school. Students were shocked; no one had expected the news. For many, it took days to process what they had heard.

On Sunday, May 2, hundreds of relatives, friends, colleagues, and former Bard students gathered to celebrate the life of Wynne Wen-Ren Wynne at the Congregation Beth Elohim Temple House in Brooklyn. Ms. Wu passed away on April 23, 2010 from metastasized breast cancer. The service was at turns poignant, funny, and inspirational. As Ms. Wu hoped, it was a celebration of life rather than the mourning of death.

On Thursday March 25th, BHSEC’s Model UN team, accompanied by Whitney Bates and Dr. Vernoff, headed down to Washington D.C. to participate in the twelfth annual Washington Area Model United Nations Conference (WAMUNC).

This Wednesday from 6th period to Dean’s hour, BHSEC will host Leila Buck and Adam Able for a presentation on their experience in the Middle East and a discussion of their views on the conflict in the region.

The Asian Culture Club’s (ACC) 3rd Annual Faculty Karaoke Fundraiser will be taking place this February in the BHSEC auditorium. The fundraiser has been a huge success in the past, raising large amounts of money for charity.

BHSEC students were devastated when, after 6 years of culinary services, Riad “Rico” Abdelsalam, better known to students as “the Blue Truck guy”, abandoned his post on East Houston street without notice at the beginning of the 2009 school year.

On Saturday, February 6th, the BHSEC PTA will be hosting a new fundraiser called Knowledge College. The event will give BHSEC parents, and anyone else interested, an opportunity to go back to college for a day and take engaging courses offered by BHSEC faculty and others.

On Saturday, November 21st, 13 American teenagers gathered with their parents in Terminal 4 of JFK International Airport. Two and a half hours later, these students, selected by BHSEC to take part in an international exchange program with the High School of Jesus and Maria in Valladolid, Spain, were still waiting outside JFK’s Au Bon Pan. “My legs hurt,” says Alejandro Anasal, one of the BHSEC students in the program, “but I was excited to meet them.”

As part of Mayor Bloomberg’s incentive to plant 1 million trees in New York City by 2017, BHSEC recently planted 26 trees in its yard. Funded by NYC Parks and the New York Restoration Project (a charity founded by Bette Midler), the city’s arboreal initiative, called PlaNYC, is part of a larger plan of 127 proposals for a greener city that was unveiled by Mayor Bloomberg in 2007.

Last week BHSEC was host to the Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation (MBC), one of the largest cable and radio networks in South Korea. They were here to film a piece on BHSEC’s innovative approach to high school education that President Obama mentioned in his speech to the NAACP earlier this year. MBC was interested in finding out more about the school which, according to Obama, promotes the kind of inventive thinking the country needs to adopt in order to succeed.