STARs To Be Honored At Breakfast January 31
Mari Jablonski was named STAR (Student-Teacher Achievement Recognition) Student for Jasper County High School (JCHS), and chose Christie McAlum as her STAR teacher.
Meanwhile, Emily Mills was named STAR student for Piedmont Academy, and she chose Mrs. Angie Marks as her STAR teacher.
They will be honored at a breakfast on Friday, Jan. 31, at 8:30 a.m. at Washington Park Elementary School.
The STAR student is a senior who scored the highest on the SAT by a certain date. The STAR also must be in the top 10 percent or top 10 of their class.
Miss Jablonski is very active at JCHS. She is in the JCHS Art Club; is president of JCHS Beta Club; editor of the JCHS Yearbook; the captain of the JCHS Cross Country team, a distance runner with the JCHS Track team; a company dance with T&K Dance Studio; AP Calculus student mentor; JCHS Gifted Student; founder and coach of Jasper County XC Summer Conditioning Program; Georgia Student Technology Competition (6x region champion and 3x state champion, Multimedia Apps); National Beta Club (National sculpture champion); Georgia Governor’s Honors Program (finalist and attendee, GHP 55), and Xterra Trail Racing (2019 Georgia Region Champion and world championship qualifier).
Of Ms. McAlum, she said, “I’ve never known a single day when Ms. McAlum wasn’t totally invested in teaching her students. She does so with a combination of dedication, compassion, complete integrity and ready humor that makes Calculus accessible, and then somehow by extension makes anything else you want to learn feel accessible too. She’s a humble person and I don’t think for a moment that she thinks of herself this way, but Ms. McAlum is an extraordinary teacher. If I am at all successful after high school, it will be in part because she helped me prove my capabilities to myself.
Ms. McAlum had this to say about Miss Jablonski, “Mari is one of the finest students I have taught in my 13-year educational career. I have known Mari for the past four years. As a freshman, she was in my advisement group. I taught her mathematics (in Accelerated Pre-Calculus and AP Calculus) her sophomore and junior year. Mari Jablonski is an exceptional student. She is brilliant, driven, and insightful. She has a superb work ethic; she never misses an assignment and her work is always conscientious and clearly focused on the objective of real learning. She will rework a problem more than once if need be; she will adroitly try different approaches until she finds one that works. Mari is a dedicated problem solver. She is quick and clever and I believe has only begun to scratch the proverbial surface of her mathematical potential.
I have also had the opportunity to interact with Mari beyond the classroom setting; she served as vice president of Beta Club last year and currently serves as president this year. As advisor to Beta Club, I can speak to the fact that Mari shows strong leadership skills and is dependable as well as creative in terms of brainstorming ideas for service projects, etc. She is also unfailingly kind to fellow member with a heart toward making sure everyone feels included. This past summer, Mari traveled to national Beta convention where she placed first in the sculpture competition and second in the handmade jewelry competition. She knows the importance of vision, hard work, and dedication in all aspects of her life.
Hopefully, Piedmont’s STAR student will be featured next week.
