Summer Bay State Games are open for registration!! Baseball, Basketball, Field Hockey, Ice Hockey, Lacrosse, Soccer, Softball, Volley, and 19 additional individual and team sports. Register online at www.BayStateGames.org

The Bay State Games is Massachusetts’ own Olympic-style athletic competition held annually since 1982. Each year the 7,000 athletes compete in 27 sports.

LWV of Amherst will hold their 65th annual used book sale on the Amherst Town Common May 3, 4 & 5. Sale hours are 9 am to 7 pm Friday and Saturday and 10 am to 3 pm on Sunday. Thousands of donated used books will be sold. Books are sorted by category; popular categories include cookbooks, children’s books, history, foreign languages, gardening, sports, and fiction. Books are priced from 50 cents up, with many books in the $2-$4 range. Tables are restocked throughout the sale so, if you love books, be sure to stop by more than once. For additional information, contact the League of Women Voters Amherst at 253-0633 or visit our website www.lwvamherst.org. The book sale is one of the oldest and largest in New England.

Food For Thought Books, a radical bookstore run as a worker collective, is opening it's space to local community vendors. Using an innovative PopUpShop model, Food For Thought will act as a venue to showcase and sell the products of homegrown small scale businesses over month long stints. The Shops will launch at our Open Market PopOff! expo on Sunday, May 5th from 1-4p. There will be facepainting, live music and a chance to talk to vendors!

On Top of New England: A Portrait of the Hills: ARHS' Nicholas Shaw, Environmental Science teacher at the Amherst Regional High School, will present an animated/narrated slide show that explores the geography and ecology, of the Taconic, Green, and White Mountains, in addition to the mountains of Maine. It also examines the colonial, romantic, and modern periods of our highland history with an emphasis on 20th century conservation. A concluding discussion will follow. Free & open to the public.

Love art? Want work experience? Multi-Arts is offering a limited number of unpaid Counselor-In-Training (CIT) positions for its 2013 Summer Camp running June 24- August 9 (4 Sessions). This program will provide excellent training for students interested in pursuing music, art, theater, teaching, or looking to gain counselor experience.
Contact: carrubla@gmail.com

This year's student-directed play is Annie Baker's ('99) "Body Awareness," a play that takes place in a fictional progressive Western Mass town bearing an uncanny resemblance to Amherst. The show is run, directed, designed and worked completely by students. This is the fourth year of the student-directed play; this year's director is Kyra Wolf with assistant director Katie Russavage. Don't miss it!

The play runs Friday 4/26 and Saturday 4/27; performances start at 7:30 in the ARHS Auditorium. Tickets are $7/$5.

Don’t miss Chorale performing live on WGBY on Sunday, April 28th at 7:00 p.m. With top honors in the Classical (Secular) and Gospel categories of WGBY’s Together in Song series, Chorale will now be featured in the series’ live showcase at the Paramount Theater. Buy tickets for the show here or watch from home and send a text message of support for our singers!

There will be a valuable evening program about the college admissions process for juniors, offered by MEFA (Massachusetts Educational Financing Authority), on Monday night, April 29, at 7:00 in the cafeteria. It is always good to get other perspectives on the admissions process. Everyone will leave with at least one new idea. Check out their website at mefa.org/juniors. They are an excellent source for all kinds of college information, including but not limited to financial information and loans.

We would like to express our gratitude to the Amherst Education Foundation for awarding two grants to ARHS this year. With this funding ARHS will support academic success for all incoming 9th-graders by implementing a common set of support practices in three areas: reading complex texts, planning and managing workload, and providing effective feedback in a diverse context. Our science classes will also have new technology that will enable students to visualize, measure, and graph photosynthesis in real time. If you are a supporter of AEF, we thank you as well! It is your support of AEF that makes it possible for AEF to make significant contributions to our schools, and thus our students.  You can help AEF and have fun too at the Spring Sprint this year. Register at amhersteducationfoundation.org 

The ARHS Community Service Club is having a Red Cross Blood Drive on April 30th from 12-5 in the back gym at the high school. We have changed the traditional hours so that more adults from the community can participate with students from the high school. If you are a parent, a coach, or a teacher, that would like to sign up to donate blood with your 16 and over students we would love to have you! Please contact iversonk@arps.org if you have a group of 4-8 people who might be interested in donating together.

As part of their long-standing commitment to educational initiatives, students, and schools in the local communities where they conduct business, the McDonald’s® owner/operators of Western Massachusetts (Franklin, Hampden and Hampshire counties) are proud to sponsor the seventeenth annual McScholar Athlete Award. This prestigious award recognizes outstanding student-athletes who demonstrate dedication, perseverance and teamwork throughout the school year.

Hundreds of students representing high schools across Western Massachusetts have received the McScholar Athlete Award. This year, ARHS has selected Justin Carey and Sarah Mangels – for the 2013 McDonald’s McScholar Athlete Award.

ARHS senior Shohini Kundu is one of 11 Massachusetts students to be named a semi-finalist in the Intel Science Talent Search for 2013 for her presentation on the use of sedimentary analysis to reconstruct geologic history. You can read more about it here.

Two ARHS music ensembles, Chorale and Hurricane Singers, recently received high honors from the Massachusetts Instrumental and Choral Conductors Association (MICCA). You can read more about the MICCA awards in the article written by Student Reportor, Emma Kolchin-Miller here.

Home-grown Fun at this Weekend’s Sustainability Festival!

Come join Ice Stars for Wounded Warriors this Friday and Saturday and help us celebrate and support those who have served our country (including the Boston PD)! All of our proceeds from the events are being donated to THE ONE FUND BOSTON and the WOUNDED WARRIOR PROJECT. This is an event designed to HONOR and THANK those who have sacrificed themselves for our nation. This is the first year we have decided to extend our charity beyond the Wounded Warrior Project, due to the tragedies that have occurred in our home city in the past week. We will be splitting all donations between the Wounded Warrior Project and The One Fund Boston.