10/18/2026
🍎✨ Thank You for Seeing, Supporting, and Celebrating Our Students!
To every family, student, community member, teacher, and staff member who helped make Thursday’s Cherokee County Schools of Innovation Exhibition Night meaningful: Thank You!
Thank you for taking time out of your evening to visit our classrooms, ask questions, listen to students, and celebrate their work. Thank you for encouraging a young person as they explained a project, shared an idea, or proudly showed what they had accomplished.
To everyone following along through our social media pages, thank you, too. Every moment you spend reading about our students, looking through their projects, leaving an encouraging comment, or sharing their achievements helps their work reach a wider audience. You help our community see the learning happening at our school.
There is something extraordinary happening at the Schools of Innovation and our students gave us so many reasons to celebrate.
🧪 In Mr. Brooks’s Chemistry class, students explored the question “Why Am I Here?” through their Elements Project. They researched why an element occupies its particular place on the periodic table, connecting atomic structure, electron configurations, isotopes, and chemical properties. Illustrations from AP Environmental Science labs offered another window into students’ scientific learning.
📈 In Mrs. Crayton’s math classes, creativity became a way to demonstrate mathematical understanding. Math 3 students recreated original photographs or drawings in Desmos by selecting and transforming function equations. Math 2 students created self portraits using geometric transformations, including reflections, rotations, translations, and dilations. Written explanations and formal papers asked students to explain the mathematics behind their artistic decisions.
🦴 In Mr. Pace’s Health Sciences classes, skeletal system projects connected anatomy with detailed visual communication. Illustrations of the hand, foot, skull, and knee brought scientific vocabulary into focus as students explored the structures of the human body. Their work showed how art and close observation can support learning that connects to future health care pathways.
🎨 In Mr. Byers’s Adobe Visual Design I and Visual Design II classes, students presented portfolios showcasing their work. These collections gave students an opportunity to share their creative voices, demonstrate developing digital design skills, and consider how visual choices communicate meaning to an audience.
🇺🇸 In Mrs. Ellison’s Civic Literacy class, students researched U.S. presidents and first ladies as part of their Executive Branch unit. They examined major domestic and foreign policies, presidential legacies, and the initiatives and influence of first ladies. Their projects connected the study of government with questions about leadership, public service, and the lasting consequences of decisions.
🌕 In Ms. Alexander’s Innovation Theatre classes, students unveiled their fall production of Tracy Wells’s A Trip to the Moon, opening a conversation about history, service, freedom, and our responsibilities to one another.
Set in the summer of 1969, the production brings students into a time of extraordinary possibility and profound conflict. Their study of the Constitution and founding documents connects with their exploration of the Vietnam War, civil rights, women’s rights, cultural change, and the Apollo Moon landing.
Then a message from a veteran made those lessons deeply personal.
This year, Innovation Theatre students adopted four veterans through Stars and Stripes Honor Flight, writing letters and cards to express their gratitude. One Vietnam veteran responded with an email explaining what their kindness had meant to him.
After nearly 60 years, he finally felt welcomed home. A classroom of teenagers, born decades after his service, helped give him a welcome he had waited a lifetime to feel.
That is an impact no grade can fully measure. Their words reached someone who needed to hear that his service mattered, that he was remembered, and that another generation cared.
The story also reached playwright Tracy Wells, who recognized our students’ work and shared that she had hoped, when writing the play, that it would have this kind of impact.
Our students will dedicate their performances to their adopted veterans and to all veterans. Please join them November 9 and 10 at 6:00 p.m. as they bring this story to the stage.
This is what your support helps make possible.
Students are learning to explain their thinking, create with purpose, understand different perspectives, and use their knowledge to contribute to the lives of others. Those experiences can change how young people see themselves and what they believe they can accomplish.
To our teachers and faculty, thank you for the planning, patience, expertise, and care behind this work. To our families, thank you for your partnership. To our community, thank you for showing up in person and online. And to our students, thank you for giving us work worth sharing and stories worth telling.
Together, we are making the future better and brighter, one student, one act of kindness, and one day at a time. 🍎💛
A Trip to the Moon by Tracy Wells
Produced by special arrangement with THE DRAMATIC PUBLISHING COMPANY, INC., of Woodstock, Illinois.
