How have you spent your summer? For 15 Trinity Christian Academy (TCA) 7^th and 8^th grade students, their summer plans consisted of an 11-day camping trip to excavate dinosaur bones in the Rocky Mountains.

TCA middle school teachers Curtis Blagburn and Dan Mills led students on the wilderness experience of a lifetime, giving them the opportunity to rock climb in the Rocky Mountains and the granite batholith in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The students experienced first-hand excavation of dinosaur bones with a team of paleontologist from Southwestern Adventist University. More than 50 bones were found in a day and a half, ranging from vertebra to huge femurs that are often multiple times longer than the students themselves. This year, one of the most unique finds was a Nano Tyrannosaurus tooth.

Recently, 116 Seniors from Trinity Christian Academy (TCA) walked the graduation stage and received their diplomas to being their college education at institutions across the country. Among the graduation class were 72 students who called TCA their school from kindergarten-12th grade. Otherwise known as "lifers," these students had some special moments throughout their last year at TCA.

This year’s class boasted seven National Merit Commended Students, eight Eagle Scouts, nine students going on to play varsity athletics at NCAA Division I schools, more than $6 million awarded in scholarships, a class average GPA of 3.89 and more than 22,000 hours of community service in the last four years. Some even developed engineering projects to help a three-year-old with hydrocephalus with his physical therapy, and others recently won three awards from the sixth annual Schmidt & Jones Awards for their performance in the production “Anything Goes.” After spending the last 13 years learning at TCA, many of the lifers will go on to pursue higher education at universities across the nation, including Yale, Northwestern, Virginia, Texas and Texas A&M.

As part of their final senior engineering projects, students at Trinity Christian Academy (TCA) created two tools designed to help three-year-old Micah Kwok, who has hydrocephalus (excess fluid on the brain), in his daily life.

One of the projects is an apparatus to help Micah, who suffers from Cortical Visual Impairment (CVI) as a result of hydrocephalus, during his physical therapy sessions. Micah has difficulty focusing on objects when there is too much noise in the background, so one group of students created an apparatus that has interchangeable visuals with high-contrast backgrounds to help Micah during physical therapy.

Another group of students created an eye-level interactive station for Micah, who is bound to a wheelchair.  The students were told to design a station that can mount toys and books at eye level for his daily therapy sessions, but it needs to be stable enough that the toys/objects don’t fall on the child.

Lisa Wong, teacher, mechanical engineer and director of technology integration at TCA wanted to give her students a project that has a real-life impact to show them how the field of engineering can help others.

Plano Resident and Trinity Christian Academy Athlete Signs National Letter of Intent

Plano resident and Trinity Christian Academy (TCA) athlete, William Gilbert has announced his plans to play baseball at the collegiate level. The TCA senior recently signed a national letter of intent for the upcoming season with Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. William was one of the school’s three talented athletes to sign a letter of intent that day, including one other TCA baseball player.

Recently, Trinity Christian Academy (TCA) received Cenergistic’s Energy Excellence Award for successfully reducing its consumption of electricity, natural gas, fuel oil and water, resulting in an energy cost savings of more than $1 million.  Dave Delph, headmaster of TCA, Steve Novakovich Board of Trustees Chairman for TCA and Steve Williamson, energy education specialist at TCA were presented the Energy Excellence Award by Gary Clark, Regional President for Cenergistic.