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Girl Scout creates Comfort Cove for Wicoff students BY AANYA MANGLA
Evan de Jong (left) and brother Darren both took gold in their weight classes at the SchalickCumberland Holiday Classic wrestling tournament in December.
Siblings are a triple threat for High School North sports BY JUSTIN FEIL
After Darren de Jong won the 190-pound weight class at the Mercer County Tournament and Evan de Jong placed second at 157 pounds, High School North wrestling coach Bill Furlong suggested the possibility
of Christine de Jong joining her brothers on the team. “‘Imagine if we had you out for wrestling, we could have three de Jongs in finals next year,’” Furlong said. “She just laughed it off. I don’t know if there’s any hope there, but she’s very athletic like the both of them.”
Christine only considered her physical education teacher’s suggestion for a second. “I feel like I’ve gotten too far into diving,” said Christine, who also does cheerleading for High School North. The de Jongs are juniors at See TRIPLETS, Page 7
Having spent the majority of my schooling in two of the most competitive school districts, I have been surrounded by students taking part in academic competitions, having a multitude of extracurriculars, and always aiming for straight As. This unknowingly pressured me to achieve the best grades and participate in after school activities as much as possible. Managing all of this has always been challenging. Continuously spending time in this environment, sometimes I find it hard for me to take a break, and when I try to do so, I don’t completely know how to take one. Maintaining this balance is crucial, so this is a problem that should be targeted from a young age. If children don’t learn the skills required to take breaks and destress, they will have trouble as they grow up. It is necessary that we teach them ways to move their focus away from anything that could be negatively affecting them, and this is what I set out to do
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in my Girl Scouts Gold Award Project. I decided to directly act on this issue by contacting schools in the West-Windsor Plainsboro Regional School District, and the principal of J.V.B Wicoff Elementary School, Maureen Cook, was extremely interested in pursuing this problem and providing a resource to the students of the school to help fix it. The school contains around 270 kids in total, all of them ranging from kindergarteners to third graders. Working with each other, we came up with the idea of creating a sensory-emotional learning room for students to go to whenever they needed to take a break, the room that is now called the Comfort Cove. The Comfort Cove is an area dedicated to mental wellness and is a resource open to the students in Wicoff. In the Comfort Cove, students can choose to spend some time in one or more of its three sections: the Art Hub, the Reading Nook, and the Sensory Corner. Each of these sections are devoted to separate de-stressing methods. See COVE, Page 4
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