Every year, the community of Oxford Hills gets together to march in the Aspire Higher day parade. The goal of the parade is to help kids become more aware of their opportunities after high school, especially post-secondary education. Kids from kindergarten all the way to seniors in highschool come together, led by the band, to march from the middle school to the high school. This year, instead of having the parade then returning to the normal schedule, the principal of Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School (OHCHS), Ted Moccia is planning out a whole day event.
The event will happen on October 22, 2014, and the school will start off with a regular schedule. The students will start their day as they would every day, but instead of going to second period the entire school will go to their CBA, which is like home room. Then when everyone is in their CBA, Moccia plans for our school to break a world record as a school and make it into the Guinness Book of World Records. He believes it will bring the school togetherand get a bigger sense of community, and that is what the whole day is about. After this, the school will go to the gym to listen to a motivational speaker, John Jenkins, who is a former mayor of Lewiston/Auburn.
After the school breaks the record, which Moccia has yet to decide what we are doing, the entirety of the high school will walk to the middle school through the nature trail, also known as the Viking Trail, which is 1.2 miles long, and connects the high school to the middle school. Then everyone, K-12, will line up and march in the parade back to the high school.
Moccia explained, “There will be a College Fair that will have between 70 and 80 representatives of colleges, universities and armed services, along with a non profit fair.” The colleges are there to represent themselves as a school and also to make high school kids aware that there are options out there. That there is life after high school, and that there are people willing to help them pursue their dreams. To make kids more aware, there will be the normal scholarship giveaways, which happen every single year. People from the community donate their money to show their support for our future. To go along with this, 237 T-shirt 93 different colleges from around the country will be given away. How we got the T-shirts is also a cool thing that Moccia did for the school. He sent out a letter to many different universities around the U.S. asking for T-shirt donations and telling them about our school and the Aspire Higher day.
The non-profit fair, established by Brewster Burns, an English teacher at OHCHS, will be going on at the same time as the College Fair. He explains, “It’s any area organization thats a non-profit, like food banks and the co-op.” These businesses that are coming to the fair are strictly non-profit making businesses. “At this fair what they do is, they come in and set up a little table, a display, and then they will be seeing students between eleven o'clock and two o'clock, which is at the same time as the college fair.” Burns explained. The purpose for this fair is to set kids up with community service opportunities or even Senior Project opportunities.
We invite you to come and watch the parade on Wednesday, October 22 at 10am to support our students.
