Senior Panther Band members Eli Higginbotham, front, and Bryce Duncan, back, rest and watch the pep rally held in the Russellville High School gym Friday after playing with other Panther band members.

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Stevenson Elementary School Kindergarteners Lay’auna Smith and Lahtiona Lacy hug Lay’auna’s mom, Ashley Mervine, on the first day of school.

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With the second week of the new school year underway, students at Russellville Independent Schools are increasingly focusing on extracurricular activities.

The Panther football team is gearing up for an exciting season on the gridiron, cheerleaders are climbing, tumbling and shouting in rigorous practices and the Russellville Marching Panther Band is lending music to it all.

“It’s going to be a lot of fun,” Band Director Brian Brown said of the band’s jazz-oriented fall show, which features an original percussion feature by RHS Percussion Instructor William Gray. “It’s about the weather but there’s a little romance in it.”

The band performed two pieces from the show – “Birdland” and “Stormy Weather” – at the band cookout Friday night at Rhea Stadium.

Several band members had earlier played at a beginning-of-the-school-year pep rally that also included the RHS cheerleaders motivating the crowd of students in the RHS gym Friday afternoon.

At Stevenson Elementary School, younger students had no less to be excited about last week.

Principal Tammy Corum said a new restaurant-style atmosphere in the Stevenson cafeteria caused one student to remark “that her favorite time of day was lunch.”

With a beautifully decorated food line and the implementation of procedural changes that help students enter and exit the cafeteria more smoothly, among other benefits, students now compete for the coveted Golden Spoon Award for good behavior in the cafeteria.

Beginning in September, third- through fifth-grade students at SES will also have the opportunity to compete in a Healthy Eating Contest that will run throughout the school year and feature students daily recording the number of fruits and vegetables they consumed the previous day. A healthy snack reward party will be the periodic prize for classes eating the most fruits and vegetables.

In other SES news the Watch D.O.G.S. (Dads of Great Students program) kicks off tonight at 6 p.m. at Stevenson. The event is for students and their fathers or other important men in their lives. The nationally recognized Watch D.O.G.S. program is being implemented at SES this year to give dads of students or students’ male role models an opportunity to devote a full day of volunteer time at SES as often as they can.

For more information about Russellville Independent Schools, check out www.russellville.kyschools.us on the Web.