Wayland Town Crier 12/15/11: Wayland girls shine at Women in Science Competition. On Dec. 3, as the sun rose slowly over the Wayland lawns dusted…

  Wayland High School will be strongly represented by the twenty musicians accepted into the 2012 Eastern District Senior Band, Orchestra, and Choral Festival to…

Wayland Student Press 12/8/11: 20 student musicians selected for Senior Districts. This year, a record 20 Wayland High School musicians were selected for the Massachusetts Eastern Senior Districts. The 20 Wayland students who were selected practiced tirelessly for their auditions after the audition list was posted last spring. The Senior District auditions took place at Milton High School. In order to prevent bias in the judging process, Senior Districts hosts blind auditions. The musicians had to perform one chosen piece from the audition list, one or more scales and an excerpt of sight reading. The auditions differed slightly depending on which section, band, chorus or orchestra, the musician tried out for.

Local students named National Merit Scholarship semifinalists. About 1.5 million juniors in some 22,000 high schools entered the 2012 National Merit Scholarship Program by taking the 2010 Preliminary sat/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. The nationwide pool of semifinalists, totaling about 16,000 students and representing less than 1 percent of U.S. high school seniors, includes the highest-scoring entrants in each state. The number of semifinalists in a state is proportional to the state’s percentage of the national total of graduating seniors. Semifinalists from Wayland High School include Ryan Budnick, Kaitlin Curran and Elena Drews. These high school seniors have an opportunity to continue in the competition for some 8,300 National Merit Scholarships worth more than $34 million that will be offered next spring.

Wayland Town Crier 5/5/11: Wayland High School student wins concerto competition. Ryan Budnick, a junior at Wayland High School, won this year’s Rivers School Conservatory Concerto Competition and will perform Mozart’s “Clarinet Concerto in A major” with the Rivers Youth Symphony on Sunday, May 8. Budnick studies clarinet with Paul Surapine and has been chosen for Mass. Senior Districts Band, All-State Band, and All-Eastern Band on clarinet, as well as Senior Districts Jazz Ensemble on alto saxophone. The concert, held at New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall, is at 2 p.m., and will also include works by Dvorak and Mussorgsky. Tickets are $15 each and can be purchased by calling 781-235-6840.

Smart Planet 3/30/11: America, meet your future (young) innovators. U.S. chief technical officer Aneesh Chopra on Wednesday announced the winners of the National STEM Video Game Challenge, a competition for primary school-aged kids to develop educational video games for their peers. The point of the competition is to motivate interest in the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering, and math. There were two separate competitions: one for students, and one for experienced developers. Among the 12 winners of the student competition — in grades 5 through 8, selected for their original game designs from a pool of more than 500 entries, was Claypit Hill 5th grader Geoffrey Wang.

Wayland Town Crier 2/21/11: Wayland resident earns Honorable Mention for painting. Graziella Pilkington of Wayland, a member of the Class of 2015 at Brimmer and…