McHenry Times

The District 300 school board celebrated several students at its Jan. 23 meeting.

Dundee Highlands Elementary school. Principal Doug Kouri brought 12 students who had been identified by their teachers as student leaders. They led the board in the Pledge of Allegiance.

The board also honored a student recognized by the Blue Ribbon Society, which is an organization that honors individuals that honor the district's mission to empower and equip all students. The award winner was Samantha Alvarez, a senior from Hampshire High School. Samantha recently received top honors at the 2022 Future Farmers of America Agro-Science Fair. She has been working in the regional science program in the veterinary program since sophomore year. She explained her genetic research project to the board which won her first place at the competition. Superintendent Susan Harkin shared how amazed she was by the work that Samantha has been doing in agricultural and genetic research. Samanath does not yet know where she will be attending college, but she plans to continue these research projects wherever she goes.

"So I believe last year I actually got to see her present on (one of her projects), and I was overly impressed at that point with how upstanding this is," Harkin said. "So great, and I got to hear firsthand pride about a 10-minute presentation on how Samantha developed this and worked with the University of Chicago. So absolutely, even more amazing that you've got here. Your future is extremely bright. So congratulations on your accomplishments to me that we're so very proud of you and we look forward to hearing what great things you do in the future as well, too."

As part of the Veterinary Science program, students are required to be involved in the FFA.

"I started this in my sophomore year and since then I've participated in several different career development events as well as a research project that I did during this time," Samantha said. "My project aimed to address a significant problem in our world today, and that is invasive species and crop pests. So two summers ago I took a summer immersion program at the University of Chicago where we learned a lot about genetic techniques. And one of the projects that we looked at was this study that they did in Florida, where they genetically modified mosquitoes and released them into the environment in order to control the species."

She took that idea and tried to address a local invasive species, the emerald ash borer beetle.

" I wanted to mediate the spread of these invasive species by targeting them through a nontraditional biopesticides genetically, and this would aim to kill them in a way that would not affect any other organisms," Samantha said.