Chasing Her Dream To Help Others

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Amy Zheng, 17, is leaning towards the fields of education and STEM, although she does not know what she wants to do career wise. For now, Zheng of West Hartford, spends her time volunteering and teaching children. “Helping others is the best gift for myself and makes me feel good, that’s why I love teaching” Zheng said. She volunteers at schools and helps teachers with their students.  At home, she helps her brother, Ryan, 12, with art and math, during the summer. She is a member of the school’s foreign language practice group.

Allyson Is Setting Her Sights On The Silver Screen

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Allyson Anderson’s life’s journey began in Kingston, Jamaica, and she intends to end it in Hollywood, California. She has played roles like Jamaican track star and a dedicated American high school student, but her greatest role is yet to come as she hopes to dazzle the world from the silver screen. “With acting, you have the opportunity to be every and anything,” she said. Allyson, 15, lives in Hartford with her sister Saige, 2, her brother Malachi, 1, and her mother Trudy-Ann. Allyson attends Achievement First Hartford High School in Hartford.

Dunn: An A Student In High School – And College

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Jax Dunn, 17, of East Hartford, has not yet started her senior year in high school, but she is already more than halfway done with getting her associate’s degree in criminal justice. In middle school, she had learned about Great Path Academy, a school located on the Manchester Community College campus. Dunn said she learned about students graduating from high school with their associate’s degrees and decided that was something she wanted to pursue. Dunn has been a straight-A student through high school and recently found out that she is in the top 10% of her college. She has also been invited to join the Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society.

A Lover Of Science And Math, Sidhi Aspires To Be An Engineer

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Sidhi Dhanda, 15, a rising sophomore at Hopkinton High School, has a passion for jazz music, robotics, and engineering. She’s been playing the electric guitar in a jazz band since middle school, made it to nationals in the Invention Convention competition this past January, and participates in yearly competitions with her school’s robotics team. “I really love robotics, engineering, in general, really love coding, and I’m also really into music and guitar,” said Sidhi, of Hopkinton Mass. Sidhi even created an invention in a 24-hour period that made it to national Inventathon Convention. “In January I entered with my friend in the Inventathon, which is kind of like a hackathon where you have 24 hours to invent something that solves a problem related to COVID in schools.

Ava Aims To Be A TV Anchor

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Ava Roulier, 15, a rising sophomore at RHAM High School in Hebron, has always had an interest in journalism. She’s written multiple articles and done several interviews. More recently, Ava has been looking into broadcast journalism and hopes to learn more about the people and society around her. “Many of us watch TV more than we read now, especially younger generations, due to advancements in technology, and [I want] to be able communicate to all different crowds,’’ she said. Ava’s mother, Laurie, is a counselor at Manchester High School and runs her own clinic while her father, Kenneth, works as an insurance regulator.

How Many Stars Did Your Hospital Earn? Check Out Our New Database

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In Connecticut nine hospitals, including Yale New Haven Hospital, Greenwich Hospital,  Lawrence + Memorial Hospital and Sharon Hospital, received an overall 4-star rating, new data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) show. But six hospitals – Bridgeport Hospital, Griffin Hospital, St. Vincent’s Hospital in Bridgeport, Manchester Memorial Hospital, Waterbury Hospital and Charlotte Hungerford Hospital – received the lowest overall rating of 1 star. The overall ratings summarize a variety of care measures that hospitals treat patients for, such as heart attacks, pneumonia and infections, and show how well each hospital performs on average compared to other hospitals in the country, according to CMS’ website. None of the state’s 28 hospitals received CMS’ highest rating of 5 stars.

C-HIT Student News: Weeks After The Tornado, Clean Up Work Continues

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Four Conn. Health I-Team journalism campers spent the week planning, scripting, shooting and producing a video story on the clean-up work going on after the May 15 tornado that devasted Sleeping Giant State Park in Hamden and damaged parts of the surrounding neighborhood and Quinnipiac University. The student journalists, Raven Joseph of the Cooperative High School, New Haven; Kiersten Harris, Amadi Mitchell and Casmir Ebubedike, all of the Achievement First Amistad High School in New Haven, spent the week interviewing officials, knocking on neighbors’ doors and shooting video.  With help from Jodie Mozdzer Gil, an assistant professor of journalism at Southern Connecticut State University, and Charlene Torres, a senior at Quinnipiac University, the students produced the first C-HIT News segment. This video was shot in July and the work on the park continues. https://youtu.be/iU15UfIG7vI

Our video team!

college aid

The Senior Year Dilemma: Financial Aid vs. Rising College Tuition

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With the average college tuition reaching new heights at public and private universities, high school students and their parents, particularly those of lower income, are under greater pressure to not only find the most suitable institutions but also the best financial aid packages. Although many universities, including Quinnipiac University in Hamden, provide financial aid packages to a large portion of students, they may not be able to cover all their students’ financial needs and may force students to transfer or take on crippling debt, Charlene Torres, a Quinnipiac senior from Bridgeport, said. Torres said some of her friends have had to drop out of Quinnipiac due to their inability to continue paying the tuition or their increasing debt. “I know my roommate sophomore year was taking out $30,000 in loans every semester just to go here,” Torres said. Financial aid is a common concern on campus.

college basketball

UConn Men’s Basketball Successfully Rebounds Academically

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After a stretch of poor Academic Progress Rate (APR) scores from 2009-2011, the University of Connecticut men’s basketball program has improved its APR dramatically. UConn’s APR was below 900 for two years in a row (2008-2009 and 2009-2010), at a time when the national average for men’s Division 1 basketball programs was around 940, the NCAA reports. In 2013, the men’s team was banned from postseason play because of “subpar” APR scores, Dom Amore, the UConn men’s basketball beat reporter for the Hartford Courant, said. Since then, the team’s APR has not dipped below 950 while the Huskies have achieved a perfect score of 1000 in three of the seasons since then. “Since the academic problems the UConn men had, the school has vastly upgraded its support system,” Amore said.

teen health

Connecticut Leads The Nation With Lowest Teen Birth Rate

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The teen pregnancy rate is at a record low in many states, but especially in Connecticut. Connecticut was ranked 50th in 2015 for teen birth rates, age 15 to 19, reports the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. Pregnancy rates for teens have been declining for decades, and have gone down 75 percent from 1991 to 2015. Recently, from 2014 to 2015, the teen pregnancy rate dropped 13 percent. The cause of this sharp decline in teen birth rates could be attributed to a number of things.