Rio Mesa High School Principal Ray Gonzales is leaving his position to begin working next week for the Oxnard Union High School District as coordinator of child welfare and attendance.

William Dabbs, the district’s assistant superintendent of educational services, will be Rio Mesa’s new principal.

Gonzales was the assistant principal of Rio Mesa for nearly six years before serving as principal for the past five years.

In his new role, Gonzales will work with school administrators to find solutions for students at risk of not graduating due to multiple absences or behavioral problems.

He will match students who are struggling in a mainstream high school environment with alternate ways to earn their diploma, such as independent study or continuationschool programs, which offer smaller class sizes.

Gonza- les will also work with the OUHSD review board that decides whether or not a student should be expelled from school, and he will oversee the development of the district’s Community Day School, which will offer classes to students who have been expelled or who’ve had attendance or behavior problems.

The district hopes to open the day school within three years.

Dabbs has 24 years of experience as a school administrator, 10 of them as principal of Pacifica High School in Oxnard.

Rocky Valles, assistant superintendent of human resources for the district, said Dabbs volunteered to take the reins at Rio Mesa because he is passionate about working on school sites.

“(Dabbs) expressed his interest when this position opened up, and it just seemed like a perfect match,” Valles said. “We have every confidence that he’s going to do a great job and the community of Rio Mesa will be very happy with his services.”

By working together with school administrators and the teaching staff, Dabbs said, he hopes to create a shared vision for Rio Mesa.

“I have always been a strong believer that all students should be successful, and we need to do everything we can to ensure their success together,” Dabbs said.

“I will be spending an awful lot of time in the classroom, having lots of discussions with teachers and lots of discussions with parents to make sure if somebody needs something, we make the appropriate resources available to benefit the students.”

This unit was developed for my culinary chemistry class for 34 students very interested in food. My challenge was to teach them chemistry from the perspective of food. I really had to change the way I thought as a teacher and instead of teaching chemistry and integrating a little food science into it, I decided to teach about food and integrate the chemistry. The science of chocolate unit was born out of this idea. I decided to teach the science of chocolate by taking student from the bean to the bar.

We imported cacao beans from South America and processed them into chocolate liquor which is essentially baker’s chocolate. They learned about chemical and physical changes that took place during this processing, the ecosystem of the rainforest where they are grown, how the plants are pollinated, and where in the world cacao beans are produced. The students also learned about percent composition when we looked at what classifies chocolate as dark, semisweet, milk, and white chocolate. We then explored the history of chocolate and turned our crude cocoa tablets into the traditional Aztec chocolate drink. It was great that a lot of my students were able to identify with their cultural roots.

Next we studied the biochemistry of chocolate and why it is classified as a super food. The students were amazed that cocoa has so many health benefits. To conclude this discussion we looked at scientific studies that supported the claims about chocolate and its health benefits. The PowerPoint developed for this unit was used on our school broadcasting station, Triton Talk, so that the entire school could also be aware of these amazing benefits. It was great to see the students at Pacifica High School start to eat dark chocolate as healthy snack during school, especially before tests.
Then it was time to get back in the lab and get down to thermochemistry and the crystallization of cocoa butter and we explored how to temper chocolate in the lab. They then took what they learned to their culinary cooking class and created beautiful boxes out of chocolate.

Last in the unit was the science of tasting chocolate where the students did a lab on sensory evaluation and used all their senses to evaluate the aroma, texture, flavor and finish and mouth feel of chocolate from 90% cocoa down to white chocolate. For most of them this was the first time the really thought about the taste of chocolate from a scientific perspective. They were able to evaluate it and use the knowledge they had gained from their labs on processing cacao bean and tempering to see how it effects the final chocolate product.

To conclude this project, students were given several project ideas on the various science topic related to our unit on chocolate and a rubric they would be graded on. These projects included posters involving the processing of chocolate, classification of chocolate types, and the crystallization of cocoa butter during tempering or brochures on the health benefits of chocolate.

Comments from the students have been very positive. They have said that they learned more this year than in other classes and that they were amazed at how much science they actually learned because it did not feel like they were learning it, just exploring what interested them most – food. Thanks to my students, I really understand 21st century learning.
Thank you again to the Ventura County Office of Education and Amgen for the generous grant for this project.

Brian Mora may only be a sophomore, but when it comes to the big moment, he has been there, done that.

The OHS Spanish and English debate teams are the 2012-13 Migrant Debate State Champions! There were 22 debate teams (11 Spanish & 11 English) in San Jose with well over 250 students participants representing teams from Sand Diego to the Oregon border. The English debate team members are: Alberto Perez, Melanie Medina, Patricia Casimiro & Elizibeth Ortiz. The Spanish debate team members are Maria Centeno, Stephanie Chavez, Aime Cano-Ramirez & Mayra Arambula. It was a grueling weekend but the teams fought hard and they made the Sting mean.

There are advantages that accompany earning the top seed in postseason, says Camarillo High boys volleyball coach Rob Vandermay.

There also is a decided challenge: Now you’ve got to play like No. 1.

“You’ve got to bring it every match,” Vandermay says. “You don’t hang any banners in the gym for being the top seed. You don’t get any rings.”

Camarillo finished the regular season at 25-5-1, including 10-0 in winning the Pacific View League championship, and was awarded the top seed in Division 3 with the release of the CIF-Southern Section playoff pairings for boys volleyball on Saturday.

Rio Mesa High boys swim coach Keith McKnett and girls coach Derrick Timmons started Thursday’s Pacific View League swim championships in the pool, taking part in a coaches relay competition that the Spartans team won.

A few hours later, McKnett and Timmons found themselves back in the pool, this time celebrating with their swimmers after another Rio Mesa sweep.

The Rio Mesa boys finished the meet with 373 points, earning them a 37-point victory over Camarillo who finished with a team score of 336. It was the 90th straight Pacific View League victory for the boys program. Pacifica finished third with 194 points.

Not to be outdone, the Rio Mesa girls scored a meet-high 396 points, cruising to a 101-point win over Camarillo, who finished with a total of 295. Oxnard was third with 216 points.

The Camarillo High boys volleyball team finished its Pacific View League regular season in perfect fashion on Tuesday, sweeping rival Rio Mesa in three games to clinch the league title and likely remain the No. 1-seeded team in its division for the upcoming playoffs.

High school students from Oxnard cooked their way to seventh place as they represented California against 42 other states and territories during a national culinary competition last weekend in Baltimore.

The team from Pacifica High School prepared a three-course meal on Saturday and learned during an awards ceremony on Sunday that it hadn’t taken any of the top-five spots in the National ProStart Invitational organized by the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation.

“They were OK with that. It was the school’s first time at nationals,” said Linnea Howe, department chair of the Culinary Arts Academy at Pacifica.

News of the team’s seventh-place ranking by a judges panel that included former White House executive chef Walter Scheib came via email after everyone had flown home and returned to class on Wednesday, Howe said.