July 2021 Congratulations MOHS Class of 2021

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Hackettstown, NJ 07840

Mt. Olive Township School District Northwest Professional Center 227 U.S. Hwy 206, Suite #10 Flanders, NJ 07836

July 2021

406 Mount Olive High School students received diplomas in June. The ceremony took place on the MOHS football field.

newsmagazine of the Mount Olive Township School District

Congratulations MOHS Class of 2021

Sara Seelman’s handwriting is so miniscule, you could stack three lines of it in a single line of a legal pad – and still have room for a doodle or two. That penmanship speaks volumes about her. She’s unassuming. And she’s organized and precise – every letter in every word is exactly the same size and height as all the others, and perfectly spaced. There’s a certain symmetrical elegance in it.

Reserved and soft spoken, Sara will surprise you with her laser sharp focus and drive. She’s intense, tough on herself in everything that she does. She has a reputation for always giving 100%. For example, as a member of the marching band’s color guard and the winter guard, Sara would often practice the routines at home.

“Her father would joke to me that she was wearing out the lawn,” said MOHS music teacher

Darrell Hendricks who lives nearby. In the core academic subjects, Sara’s

commitment and motivation was even stronger. Karen Sterling had Sara in AP Biology in 2019-2020. Right before the district implemented full remote learning, the class, ironically, was studying viruses.

“I still have the virus model that Sara made me, sitting on a shelf,” said Sterling. “She created it from modeling clay and it’s so detailed. It must have taken hours and hours. She had to mold every tiny piece. She has the drive to make everything just so.”

This year, Sara served as president of the school’s chapter of the National Math Honor Society. Math teacher Farsheed Taschayyodi took over as adviser in the middle of the year.

“I hadn’t met Sara [before becoming adviser], but when speaking with other teachers who knew her, they said to me that I was so lucky because I had her,” Taschayyodi said. “They were so right, she’s a rock star.”

When the NMHS worked on a project for Black History Month about notable Black mathematicians, Sara grabbed the reins. She talked with tee shirt companies, compiled prices from vendors. The day after the senior prom, when other kids were kicking back, Sara was working in Google Docs with Taschayyodi, preparing for the NMHS induction ceremony. That’s dedication.

Sara will attend Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute this fall and major in biomedical engineering. Engineering runs in the family. Her mother works as an environmental engineer, her father is a civil engineer, and her older sister just wrapped her junior year studying chemical engineering. Sara, though, isn’t firm in her major. When you are so multi-talented, interests abound.

She excelled in every subject; in addition to the National Math Honor Society she was also a member of the Science National Honor Society, the World Language Honor Society, and the National English Honor Society. She even sang with the school’s Madrigals choir.

An avid baker, Sara enjoys dance and perform-ing with her church choir, though unfortunately singing has been put on hold for a while.

Nick Tarallo is your typical teenager. He

watches basketball (Nets) and baseball (Mets). He plays video games with his friends. And he can do a Rubik’s Cube in 15 seconds. (He has a collection of about 30 different Rubik’s Cube-like 3-D combination puzzles in all shapes and sizes.) He’s your typical teenager – who just happens to be one of the brightest students in the country.

That’s not just an opinion. As a junior, he scored in the top 0.4% of the 3.8 million students who took the Preliminary SAT, an exam that measures language and math skills important for success in college and beyond. For that achievement, he was named a finalist in the 2021 National Merit Scholarship Program by the College Board.

The valedictorian is quiet and laid back. An in-disputable math whiz, Nick took AP Calc BC, the highest level, last year in 2019-2020.

“It was fun for me to assign group work and see Nick interact with his peers,” said teacher Farsheed Taschayyodi. “He was a junior in a class with seniors. It was great. Everyone de-ferred to Nick and would double check their work with him. I’ve seen him tutor some kids. What stands out is seeing him, after not having Calculus AB for over year, helping students with-out batting an eye. He’s that good.”

Nick also performed with the marching band

Top ofThe Class of 2021Valedictorians Sara Seelman & Nick Tarallo, salutatorians Alyssa Dowd & Vedh Koutha

Sara Seelman

and jazz band, playing baritone and trombone respectively.

“Nick is loyal and dependable,” said music teacher Darrell Hendricks. “If he makes a com-mitment, he follows through. Overall he’s pretty quiet, but he also can be really fun. He’s got a dry sense of humor that I think he picked up from his dad [Joseph Tarallo, an electrical engineer and en-thusiastic supporter of the music department].”

Throughout his time at MOHS, Nick has been a member of the school’s robotics team. In years past, the team would design and build a robot from the ground up that would compete in a sports-style event. Because of the pandemic, the annual competition was canceled, though there were some online challenges. He and the other MORT seniors made it their mission to try to smoothly pass the baton and teach the younger MORT members the skills they’ll need when the competition resumes next year.

“Our focus was on trying to teach the under-classman as much as we could since they didn’t get a lot of the experiences and the opportunities that they would normally have gotten because of COVID,” he said.

This fall, Nick is bound for Northeastern Uni-versity to study computer engineering and com-puter science. In the future, he would like to explore careers in artificial intelligence and per-haps self-driving cars.

One drizzly morning this spring, Alyssa

Dowd walked into her anatomy and physiology class drenched from head to toe. While the rest of the world would have bristled at the inconven-ience, the clamminess of wet clothes against skin, Alyssa wasn’t bothered. In fact, on the way into school she had intentionally taken her time and ambled through the rain with a friend, appreciat-ing the simple wonder of Mother Nature.

That’s Alyssa, always seeing the bright side. On those dark days, she doesn’t need sunshine,

she is sunshine. “Alyssa lights up the room,” said science

teacher Jennifer Brown. “She’s sweet and funny, too. She and her group would come up with the best projects. She made the class better.”

Shortly after the AP Calculus BC exam, when all the heavy lifting in the class had been done, Alyssa wrote a quote on one of teacher Farsheed Taschayyodi’s white boards: You miss 100% of the shots you don't take. Students in other classes followed her lead. After several days, all eight white boards in the classroom had been filled with inspirational quotes about perseverance and positivity, decorated with flowers and hearts. Alyssa had started the wave.

Alyssa credits her parents for instilling in her a perpetual optimism. But seeing the glass half full doesn’t get you to salutatorian. Alyssa has a knack for conceptual thinking and loves science.

“She was the best student that I taught this year,” said teacher Karen Sterling, who had Alyssa for AP Biology. “Dedicated. Hard-work-ing. She knows what she wants and yet stays true to herself. She’s self-confident and engaging, and to me those are two keys to good leadership.”

This fall, the chocolate afficionado will study biological sciences at Rutgers. Beforehand, though, she’s looking forward to spending time in one of her favorite places, Lake St. Catherine in Vermont. Her family has been traveling there for years and the getaway has become a tradition. A relative owns a lake house on the 850-acre lake and Alyssa’s days are spent boating and swim-ming, something she loves. (Alyssa competed on the MOHS swim team and for the past nine summers as part of the Mount Olive Pirates Swim Team, a community swimming group.)

Down the road, Alyssa sees herself research-ing cancer or Alzheimer’s disease, something that fits her nature and love of helping others. In her junior and senior years, she participated in the school’s Leo Club, an organization dedicated to service projects focused on literacy, education, senior citizens, children, and people with physi-cal challenges and learning disabilities.

Learning about Vedh Koutha is like

watching a late-night infomercial; every five minutes Ron Popeil seems to stick his head in to exclaim “But wait, there’s more!” That’s a testament to the salutatorian’s depth of knowledge and character.

Science and math are Vedh’s interests and strengths. The programming co-lead of the high

school’s award-winning robotics team is heading this fall to Georgia Institute of Technology, one of the top research universities in the country. There he’ll study computer science, a topic apro-pos for someone described by faculty members as “analytical.” That’s a talent that he’s been able to apply to every subject at Mount Olive High School.

“His analytical nature was perfect for my class,” said teacher Lori Tatum who had Vedh for AP Language and Composition. “Vedh brilliantly made connections to whatever material we were working on, connections that made sense and that mattered. His ability to connect real-world things and tie in his knowledge will take him far. He also has wonderful sense of humor that’s play-fully sarcastic. We’ve had a lot of fun banter.”

But wait, there’s more. Vedh has excelled in the arts, too. He’s an ac-

complished oboist who brought to the wind en-semble a sophistication far beyond his years.

“He has great musical intuition,” said music teacher Darrell Hendricks. “If he’s given a melody, he immediately knows how to craft it in a mature manner. That doesn’t happen very often. You can tell that he’s listened to classical music. I talk about him with my coworkers all the time and how we’re going to miss him.”

But wait, there’s more. Vedh enjoys baking, primarily cookies and the

occasional cake, and not that boxed stuff either. “There’s some satisfaction making something

from scratch,” Vedh said. “I think one day I just said ‘I’ll bake some cookies’ and then saw it was pretty fun.”

He became a mini internet celebrity this year when he baked cookies for Salman Khan, creator of the Khan Academy, the popular online educa-tion platform. On TikTok, Vedh posted that he would bake cookies for Khan if the entrepreneur responded and said hello. He did and the die was cast. Vedh baked the cookies in Khan’s honor and posted a video of their preparation on TikTok, which Khan reposted with commentary. Khan’s post garnered 21,000 likes.

But wait, there’s more. Vedh competed on the school’s soccer and ten-

nis teams, served on the school’s Future Business Leaders of America club, and volunteered (pre-pandemic) at Hackettstown Hospital.

Stay tuned. There’s more to come.

Nick Tarallo

Alyssa Dowd

Vedh Koutha

www.motsd.org ǀ Twitter: @MountOliveTSD

B O A R D O F E D U C AT I O N Dr. Anthony Giordano

President

Rhonda Cohen Vice President

Dr. Antoine Gayles John Kehmna

Elizabeth Ouimet John Petrie

William Robinson

Anthony Strillacci Christopher Zeier

Dr. Robert Zywicki, Superintendent

David Bodmer

OUNT Olive High School

teacher David Bodmer has been awarded a fellowship to Project Invent, a program that helps educators bring unique product design and prototyping experiences to students.

Bodmer, who teaches digital design and fabrication, will remotely attend an intensive weeklong conference this summer and participate in four other professional development workshops throughout the year. He will also work with other Project Invent fellows to share effective teaching strategies and ideas.

Beginning in September, he will use Proj-ect Invent’s development curriculum to guide a group of high school juniors and sen-iors through the complete design and proto-typing process. The young product engineers will identify a real-world problem, brain-storm creative solutions, and manufacture a working model of their best design.

In December, the students will receive feedback on their initial ideas from industry leaders in companies such as Google and Facebook. After incorporating that input into their final design and protype manufacture, the students will present and pitch to a group of investors who could bring the product from the high school fabrication lab to store shelves everywhere.

“This is a year-long journey for me and my students,” said Bodmer. “It brings Mount Olive High School’s product engineering program to the next level. Project Invent will help students use technology, creativity, and collaboration skills to become thoughtful problem solvers and entrepreneurs. They’ll have a unique opportunity to learn from top professionals and possibly see their invention help the world. That’s exciting.”

Bodmer, who has taught in Mount Olive since 2009, is also the adviser to the school’s marine advanced technology education club which designs and constructs remotely oper-ated underwater robots.

MOHS teacher receives fellowship

District showcased by state organization

See more graduation photos at motsd.org

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HE district was recently recognized by JerseyCAN, a nonprofit organization

that advocates for high-quality schools for all New Jersey students.

On its website and in complementary documentation, JerseyCan showcased the district’s data-driven academic support program which provides remediation tailored to meet each student’s unique learning needs. The district’s behavioral supports and social emotional learning practices were also featured.

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