Mineola Village Board Honors High School Scholars

A pair of students were in at the Wednesday night, not because they were auditing the meeting, but because they were one of the reasons for the meeting.

Seniors Jessica Shi and Bethanne Bartscherer are among the high school’s “best and brightest” principal Ed Escobar said, joined by science research teacher Dr. Ellen McGlade-McCulloh and Superintendent Dr. Michael Nagler. “They’re both very very enthusiastic students,” Escobar said. “They come from very nurturing caring homes and they’ve been educated by very very caring challenging teachers.”

Shi, a  in the top 99 percentile in the country, will be this year’s , and Bartscherer is the . Shi had also applied for the Intel competition, but was not accepted as one of the approximate 300 students chosen from across the United States.

“I’m proud of just applying because it’s pretty tough,” Shi said, “its even worse that a college app(lication) I would have to say.”

Her project – whose incredibly long title – basically “means that one plant protein has to recognize a pathogen protein in order for the plant to defend itself.” Shi told the board that she is actually wants to go into psychology or behavioral research, and has been accepted into MIT early, but is also waiting to hear from four other schools.

Bartscherer’s project on the other hand was entitled “Comparing Novel Cholinergic Agonists’ Potency in Inhibiting Cytokine Production.”

“And to a lay person that means?” Mayor Lawrence Werther asked.

Bartscherer explained her research has to do with stopping inflammation in the cells which is the root cause of some diseases such as lupus and “eventually the best of what I tested will be used to make drugs to treat the diseases caused by inflammation.”

She told the board she intends to become a surgeon and while she has been accepted into Binghampton and Stony Brook, she is waiting on nine other schools including Cornell, Columbia, Hopkins, Tufts, Boston College, Harvard and Yale.

“I’m looking at senior citizenship in not to many years so I hope your research will lead to something that will help me out,” Werther said, joking.

Each of the girls were presented with citations of accomplishment from the board.

“It is one of the most important things we can do to ensure ourselves as a community and as a nation and when an educational system goes out of the way to distinguish itself by bringing scholars up through the ranks and also the parents of those scholars who place the emphasis on what is right and what their children should be doing,” Werther said. “It just makes everyone in the community feel good, it makes everyone in the country feel good and it ensures what we do as a nation.”

One of the girls’ teachers is also a member of the village board: Trustee Paul Pereira, who was a chaperone when Shi and Bartscherer went to Europe as part of a class trip and taught both of them AP European History in the ninth and tenth grade.

“I’d like to think that that had something to do with it but listening to the titles of their research I know that it had absolutely nothing to do with it,” Pereira remarked, laughing.