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July 21, 2006
ANDOVER—When asked what conditions were like last year at the New Orleans elementary school where she teaches a gifted program, Puri Sabina simply rolled her eyes. The message was received loud and clear—as were her expectations for the year ahead: bureaucracy and corruption are slowing Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts, she said.
“There’s so much media focused on it, but still it is going so slowly,” she added.
But Sabina, whose school was the first in New Orleans reopened after Katrina’s rampage last August, is not without optimism, especially given her experience this summer in the Andover Bread Loaf Writing Workshop. When not writing, Sabina and her fellow Bread Loaf teachers spent their time at Phillips Academy bonding, by discussing thorny issues of education that sometimes go unmentioned.
“We were open with each other,” said Sabina.
Tizona Watts, another teacher from New Orleans, said she too formed bonds at Andover Bread Loaf (ABL) that she does not intend to break. But when she returns to work for the new academic year, she plans to bring with her more than good intentions. She will bring the story of the Lawrence, Mass., schoolchildren that learned and grew through a concurrent ABL session.
On Friday, July 21, those 60 students took to a makeshift stage in a community center in Lawrence’s historic district. They stepped into the spotlight and, with more than a hundred people watching, they read poems they had crafted as part of the program. Some poems were very short, others long. Some were funny (one young man explained in verse the incredible and otherworldly circumstances that resulted in an absence from school) and others were quite serious in tone (one young lady described her troubled neighborhood, and another choked back tears while voicing appreciation for her mother).
“I think these students are awesome,” said Watts, a reading coach whose elementary school did not reopen post-Katrina until February 20, 2006. She plans to bring back to her students samples of the Bread Loaf kids’ writing—as well as photos of the authors. Watts wants her students in New Orleans to know what the kids from Lawrence have accomplished with the written word. “I want the children to see,” she said.
Lou Bernieri, ABL’s executive director, said even after the teachers have returned to New Orleans, Bread Loaf will do its best to continue to support them. “They don’t know what they’re going back to,” he noted. “Some of the teachers we have are from the two wards that were totally washed away by Katrina. Some don’t even know if they’re going to have a job when they get back.”
Bernieri said participating teachers are encouraged to contact the ABL program after they return home, so those here at Andover will know how they may continue to support them.
The teacher-training portion of ABL—a graduate-level class for professional development credit—features three strands: writing, literature, and educational theory and method. The New Orleans teachers were but five of 19 taking part in this year’s workshop. Participating teachers also hailed from Lawrence and Oakland, Calif.
ABL has long had a relationship with Lawrence schools and opened up a project with Oakland just last year, but New Orleans is new in 2006. Thanks to support from Steve Sherrill ’71, a member of the Andover Board of Trustees, this is the first of three consecutive years ABL will host five teachers from the Big Easy.
Andover Bread Loaf (ABL) is a private, non-profit organization that works with U.S. and international private and public school teachers to enhance the teaching and learning of writing and to help catalyze educational renewal in classrooms, schools, school systems, and communities. Founded in 1987, ABL is a collaboration between PA and the Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College’s graduate school of English. |
