The school store at La Follette HS - the Lancer Zone - has received Gold Certification - the highest level - as a school-based enterprise from DECA, the international association for high school and college students studying business.

The work at the Lancer Zone needed to apply for recognition for this outstanding achievement was done by students in the Marketing Management class taught by June Anderson.

The school store, which has operated as a school-based enterprise for six years, will be recognized at DECA's international conference later this year.

---

Madison West senior Natasha Holmes is one of two winners of the Young Entrepreneur of the Year award from the WI Dept. of Public Instruction and the WI Dept. of Commerce. Natasha received a recognition plaque from Governor Jim Doyle during National Entrepreneurship Week in late February.

She designs and markets her own line of jewelry through a business called Natasha Nicole Jewelry.

---

Victoria Straughn, a social studies teacher at La Follette, is the winner of the 2007 Teacher of the Year Award given by the Organization of American Historians for her contributions to improve history education.

Among other achievements, Straughn is recognized for establishing a history museum and archives at La Follette. The archives functions as a research center for students and the public on Midwest high school history from 1963 to the present. She has also created a comprehensive women's history curriculum at the school.

---

The Madison Metropolitan School District is ranked #57 in the nation on the list of The Top 100 Employers of the Class of 2008 by The Black Collegian magazine.

The Top 100 list determines by survey the most active recruiters of college seniors for entry level jobs. The Madison School District is also one of only nine K-12 school districts to make the list.

Click here for more information about Black Collegian's Top 100 Employers.

---

Six Madison schools -- East, Emerson, Falk, La Follette, Mendota and Midvale -- have been awarded 21st Century Community Learning Center (CLC) grants from the WI Dept. of Public Instruction. The grants of five years for each new Center and three years for each continuing Center could total $2.725 million with evidence of satisfactory implementation.

For Falk, La Follette and Mendota, the grants are new. The grants for East and Emerson are also new and come through a partnership with the Goodman Atwood Community Center.

CLCs provide academic, recreational, cultural, and personal enrichment and support to students after school, before school, or during the summer. CLCs typically target their services to students with high academic needs and students from economically disadvantaged families.

---

Hamilton Middle School won the top team award in the state Mathcounts competition earlier this month. In addition, three of the four members of the state team are MMSD students. Abraham Shin and William Xiang from Hamilton, and Laura Xu from Jefferson Middle School were among the top finishers from about 140 students.

The coach of the state team is Loi Nguyen, a math teacher at Hamilton. The team will represent Wisconsin in the National Mathcounts competition in Denver in May.

---

Memorial High School's Suvai Gunasekaran and her research project earned the runner-up award at the Capital Science and Engineering Fair recently held on the UW-Madison engineering campus. Gunasekaran earned a trip to showcase her research project at the International Science and Engineering Fair in Atlanta in May.