Weeks’ Students Inducted into National Junior Honor Society
You should have seen the young sharp minds and their proud families flocking into Weeks Middle School Thursday night for the first induction ceremony held by the school’s newly activated chapter of the National Junior Honor Society (NJHS).
Parking space was at a premium and the auditorium was nearly filled for the pomp and circumstance that welcomed more than a hundred new members into the fold of an organization that was founded in 1929 and has chapters in all fifty states. Weeks now joins Hoyt as the only DMPS middle schools with active NJHS chapters.
Besides achieving at least a 3.5 GPA, each of the inductees had to be nominated by a faculty member based on the rest of the five-pointed NJHS rubric which consists of character, leadership, service and citizenship in addition to scholarship.
Guest speaker Chris Reeves, a School Improvement Leader at Weeks and an alumnus of the school, further emphasized the leadership and service components in his remarks. Then it was time for Tracy Cavalier, a science teacher at Weeks and the founder of the new chapter, to preside over the ceremonial lighting of the flames, one for each of the five NJHS tenets. The NJHS symbol is a lit torch but the votive candles on the stage made the point and served the purpose.
Rank does have its privileges, so the 32 8th graders’ names were the first ones called by Cavalier, followed by 34 7th graders and 38 6th graders. Each honoree came to the stage and was presented with a certificate, a long-stemmed carnation and best of all, an NJHS membership card. There just might be a run on new wallets and billfolds on the Southside this weekend. The card-carrying contingent of the NJHS that’s headquartered there will need accessories commensurate to the ties and dresses and corsages they were decked in Thursday night.
