Three NMS Teachers Receive Literary Grants

By Jeff White

The Newtown Middle School has an award-winning literary journal, which now should become even better thanks to two grants received from organizations with a commitment to student writing.

Art teacher Claudia Clancy and Nancy Martin, the head of the Language Arts Department, have received a $1,000 Help-A-Teacher grant co-sponsored by Ames department stores and the SHOPA (School and Home Office Products Association) Foundation for Educational Excellence.

Of the 1,815 teachers who applied for the grant, only 106 grants were awarded in 35 participating states.

 In addition, Fran Simone, another English teacher, has received a $250 Creative Communications (CC) Language Arts Grant for having a large number of her poetry students contribute to CC’s 1999 Celebration of the Northeast’s Young Poets.

The three teachers co-advise the middle school’s The Journal, an annual literary magazine comprised of prose, poetry, music composition and artwork. “It really has been a wonderful project,” Mrs Clancy said last week of her 12 years on The Journal.

For the most part, the magazine has been traditionally funded through the middle school’s PTA and the principal’s office. Still, the money has been just good enough to put out a black and white journal, without any contributors receiving a complimentary copy. Mrs Clancy hopes that this will all change with the SHOPA grant, which she says will more than pay for The Journal’s production.

“With this wonderful grant, hopefully we can add color to The Journal,” she said. Mrs Clancy also indicated that she intends to use the money to give each contributor his or her own copy, as well as distribute the finished magazine throughout town.

The money Mrs Simone received from the CC grant will also prove invaluable to The Journal’s production. She has been involved with Celebration of Young Poets, an annual anthology of verse that comprises student submissions up through 12th grade. Certain schools that submit more than is common qualify to apply for special $250 grants.

Of all of the middle school’s submissions to A Celebration of Young Poets, 24 students were selected for publication. It was in addition to this honor that Mrs Simone found out that she qualified for the $250 grant based on the volume of her students who participated in Creative Communications’ contest.

For Mrs Simone, the importance of published writing at such a young age cannot be overstated. “The more [students] see their writing published, the more confidence it builds,” she said. “It’s great to get kids published in The Journal,” she added, hoping that with the increase in funding, more submissions to the school’s literary magazine will be able to be taken.

A Literary School

In 1993 and again in 1996, The Journal was recognized nationally with the “Highest Award” from the National Council of Teachers in English.

To thumb though its 60-plus pages is to behold poetry on contemporary events, essays on history and international affairs, original short fiction, lyrical verse on nature and even student-composed music scores, all intricately illustrated with artwork.

“[The Journal] is really 99 percent student-generated,” said Mrs Clancy. Sixth- through eighth-grade staff members edit submissions, placing selected student work onto disk for publication. Mrs Clancy oversees an art staff that creates illustrations, designs The Journal’s pages, and pastes work into the magazine.

Writing comes from not only student’s own class work, but from outside school as well, as many young writers choose to submit pieces that they write on their own time. “[The Journal] includes articles from across the disciplines,” said Nancy Martin of the magazine’s content, although she admitted that she would like to see more submissions from the different disciplines.

Students begin meeting in March, both before and after school, and The Journal goes to press in the late spring, just as the year is winding down.

All three teachers hope that the grant money will help put The Journal 2000, this year’s magazine for which writing is already being collected, into more hands than ever before. Mrs Clancy commented that on the outset of each year’s edition, it is hard to visualize the finished product.

“We never know what kind of work we’ll be getting until we get it,” she said. “So we build around that.”