MCH Serves its Community

As one of MCH’s six core values, service is an important aspect of life at the Home. While our youth participate in community service throughout the year, they increase their involvement in serving our communities during the summer months.

Kicking off the summer right, the girls in one of our Waco campus home units were up bright and early and ready to serve at Meals & Wheels, We Deliver! Our youth made salads that were to be delivered the same day and swept and mopped the loading area.

With smiles and eager to help, our youth completed their tasks without complaint. This group of young ladies will be serving in this capacity three times each week throughout the summer.

All of our youth on the Waco campus, Boys Ranch and Waxahachie campus are providing some form of community service on a weekly basis. We will keep you updated throughout the summer on our youth’s community service experiences.

Here are some photos from this week’s service at Meals & Wheels, We Deliver!

Tyler office celebrates its first high school graduate

The Tyler outreach office staff celebrated their first high school graduate last month.

Heather graduated from Whitehouse High School on May 28, 2011. There was a celebration in her honor with her foster family, birth family and the outreach office staff.

Heather will be attending Angelina College in the fall. Congratulations Heather!

MCH University of Texas Charter School Graduation 2011

Congratulations to our 2011 graduates! A total of 43 seniors from the Waco campus, Boys Ranch, Waxahachie campus and foster care graduated this month. Twenty-eight of those seniors graduated from our University of Texas on-campus charter school in Waco. Preston, a resident of the Boys Ranch, earned valedictorian and Amanda, a Waco campus resident, earned salutatorian.

We are very proud of our youth who worked incredibly hard throughout the year to achieve their educational goals. And we say with much appreciation, "Thank you!" to our staff who work with our youth daily to help them reach their goals for success.

Here are some photos from our charter school’s June 1, 2011, graduation ceremony.

Students Create their own Films

Susan Roberts, the art teacher for the University of Texas Charter School on the Waco campus, and her students have spent the last six weeks working on an animation film project. This past week the animated short films were played during the lunch period for the whole student body.

The first few weeks of this project were spent viewing a variety of animated films, ranging from cell animation, stop-action filming and digital animation, explained Mrs. Roberts. The students were then assigned the task of making a 15 to 20-second film consisting of at least 100 slides of their characters, with two characters per film. Each film had to consist of a background and storyline including the two characters that were painted on transparencies with acrylic paint.

“The purpose of this assignment was to create an environment of teamwork and to experiment with the art form of cell animation,” Mrs. Roberts said.

As an example of how much work goes into animated movies, there are about 800 cells or frames per second in a typical film. That means a 90-minute feature, similar to Megamind, contains over four million cells or frames.

“The students were proud of their short films,” Mrs. Roberts said. “One film featured two men fishing in a lake. The students quickly learned how meticulous the planning and preparing can be, even for such a short film.”