The Write Stuff

PALMER — Rather than selling magazines, popcorn, cookie dough or some other item as a fund-rasier, Colony Middle School Principal Mary McMahon borrowed a bit of excellence from Palmer Junior Middle School.

She said she’s known Principal Gene Stone for years and credits his schools Read-A-Thon fund-raiser as the genesis of her school’s Write-A-Thon fund-raiser, now in its second year.

“It’s such a good thing for our kids to take part in,” McMahon said. “They’ve seen this side of themselves — that they can do anything.”

But what began as a simple academic fund-raiser to help pay for clubs, after school activities and special events, such as the school’s Evening of Excellence, turned out to be bigger than anyone had planned.

Instead of a simple fund-raiser the idea grew into a book set for release in January 2011, called “With These Hearts and Hands: Journeys of the CMS Knight Writers.” All proceeds from the book’s sale will go back into the school’s write-a-thon account to fund future writing projects and various student activities, McMahon said.

“It was so empowering for our kids to have a voice,” she said.

The Alaska project is similar to a publishing effort by California teacher Erin Gruwell, who in 1999 published “The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them,” which became the basis for the 2007 movie “Freedom Writers.”

McMahon said Gruwell and one of her former students, Maria Reyes, visited Colony Middle during last school year’s Write-A-Thon.

“Listening to Maria talk about her life struggles and how she rose above them sparked the courage and desire within our students to share snippets from their own lives: the issues they were dealing with at present,” wrote Sacha Pettitt in the forward to the Knight Writer’s forthcoming book, which includes 74 student essays.

And based on the success of last year’s Write-A-Thon, the school repeated the event this fall. Students spent the first hour of the school day Monday engaged in a schoolwide writing event called Stop, Drop, and Write.

All 620 Colony Middle students created a draft essay and may choose to finish their essays and submitt them for review for inclusion in next year’s book, McMahon said.

Beyond its intended role as a fund-rasier and good practice writing, the project has had some other benefits staff did not anticipate.

“Most of the stories that wrenched our hearts, made us laugh, cry or swell with pride needed the most support, grammatically speaking,” Pettitt writes in the forward. “These were the students we realized that were so busy trying to survive their shipwreck of a life that they didn’t have time to learn.”

McMahon said the school hadn’t planned to publish a book, until they saw the quality of their students’ stories.

“Once we started reading their papers we laughed and we cried,” she said. “It went from being a Write-A-Thon to much more than that.”

The Read-A-Thon raised about $8,000 in its first year, McMahon said. This year looks to be smaller, but the goal is to build the event into the school’s primary yearly fund-raiser.

Eighth-grader Marshall Whited is one of the Write-A-Thon’s success stories. Before he wrote his untitled essay, McMahon said he was angry and often in trouble at school.

“I wrote about getting into foster care after my step-father pushed me down the stairs,” said the rail-thin young man in skinny jeans and a zipup hoodie. “It was a pretty good story, too.”

In his true story, he and his older brother hear their mother’s screams of pain and terror and run up the stairs to her aid. But their step-father pushes the young hero down the stairs and tackles his older brother. Undaunted, the heroes fought on.

“I stumbled to my feet and grabbed what was in sight, a fire extinguisher, and ran up the stairs and hit my step-dad in the leg as hard as I could six times. My step-dad cried out in pain and bit Walker in the arm. My brother screamed and squirmed his way out from under my step-dad and ran down the stairs. My step-dad chased him down the stairs like a lion chasing prey,” Whited wrote.

He said it helped him to write down his story. He said he thought it was too violent and wouldn’t be published.

“Forget it. He’s in our school. He matters,” McMahon said. “His story is real.”

The lesson, Whited said, is something bad can turn out to be good.

Fellow eighth-grader Tom Leigh said he had no idea until he read Whited’s story. “We had no idea what was going on,” he said.

Leigh wrote a fictional story about a kid walking home from the bus. When he goes into the woods to use the bathroom, he discovers a big glowing egg that allows him to fly.

The moral is to use the opportunities you have to live your dreams to the fullest, he said.

Eighth-grader Larkin Udomporn also wrote a bit of fiction during Monday’s Stop, Drop and Write exercise. He said his story is about a a character whose whose father tells him to set a goal and work for it.

“He wants to be a superhero, but he’s a kid and figures it will never happen,” Udomporn said.

But then the unexpected happens when he goes through a portal into another world.

“In the end it turns out he was the one that was supposed to save this kindgom,” Udomporn said.

Seventh-grader Catherine Zagyva’s story from last year also will be in the Knight Writers soon-to-be-released book. Last year she wrote about working with her church to make sandwiches to share with hungry people. And this year she wrote about her experience being in the play “Thoroughly Modern Millie.”

“It was really difficult,” she said of learning her part, which included tap dancing, in a short amount of time. “But I made a lot of new friends.”

Zagyva said she hopes her piece this year is picked for inclusion in next year’s book. She said she was surprised when she read some of her classmates stories last year.

And some of her friends were inspired by her story, too, Zagyva said.

After reading her story about making sandwiches for hungry people, one of her friends wanted to go along and help, she said.

Principal McMahon shares her students’ excitement for the project.

“It will have an ISB number and everything,” McMahon said. “I can’t wait to read it.”

For more information, or to donate to the fund-raiser, call 761-1500. Donations also may be made online at cms.matsuk12.us; look for the Write-A-Thon link on the left-hand side of the page.

Contact Heather A. Resz at heather.resz@frontiersman.com or 352-2268.