The students receive a national award for their school's newspaper, the Manatee Messenger.
By WAVENEY ANN MOORE
Published May 2, 2004
ST. PETERSBURG - Melrose Elementary Center for Communication and Mass Media has won a national award for its student newspaper.
The school's Manatee Messenger was recognized for excellence in a student-written and student-produced newspaper by Time magazine and Time for Kids.
"I'm ecstatic. I've always known that it's something special," principal Susan Graham said. "To be nationally recognized for student writing, photography and publishing is really cool."
Melrose was the national winner in the elementary school category, Ms. Graham said. Canyon Vista Middle School in Austin, Texas, won for middle schools, and Oxford High School in Oxford, Miss., won for high schools. Melrose, she said, won its distinction in the national competition for school newspapers and magazines for imparting information about the school and its community.
The issue submitted to the competition carried front-page stories about a flu outbreak in November on campus, Melrose's eight sets of twins and the institution's ranking as a B school as a result of improved test scores. Twins are 3.27 percent of Melrose's student body, which is pretty interesting, the newspaper said, because twins make up only 1.15 percent of the population worldwide.
"Every story that's in the newspaper is something that the kids have come up with," said Cynda Mort, the school's journalism curriculum coordinator. "They do awesome work. I think they love going out and reporting. They know when they come here they have a job to do. They have a lot of responsibility."
Melrose, which became a magnet school in 1998, began focusing on journalism 21/2 years ago.
Each of the school's 500 students, from kindergarten to fifth grade, is involved in the production of the newspaper. Children work in a variety of positions, including reporters, photojournalists and copy editors. Some work on the business side, selling advertising or marketing the newspaper. Some deliver the paper.
"It's a real-life experience, and I think it's really helped with both their confidence and their communication skills. It's just so professional," Ms. Graham said.
"The fourth- and fifth-graders, they are just feeling really good about themselves and confident," Ms. Graham said, and several have indicated that they want to continue to study journalism when they move to John Hopkins Middle School.
She and Mrs. Mort recently presented a workshop about how to build a journalism program from the ground up at a meeting of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development in New Orleans, Ms. Graham said.
Melrose, 1752 13th Ave. S, will be featured in Time and a special publication of Time for Kids. It will receive $2,000 in cash, $500 for classroom products and a workshop presented by a Time or Time for Kids editor. An award ceremony will be held June 8 in Alexandria, Va. Students learned of their honor last week on Mel TV, the school's in-house television channel that broadcasts live every morning.
The award comes at an important time for Melrose, which has its academic struggles. It is one of four south Pinellas schools where more than 40 percent of third-graders scored at Level 1, the lowest, in the reading portion of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, or FCAT. Such students are in danger of being retained in third grade. The school, which qualified for a reading coach, is in the first year of that six-year program, Ms. Graham said.
Fourth-grade reading scores are up 10 points, according to a national assessment, but still below the national norms, she said. Writing scores have risen over the past three years.
"We know that we have lots of room for improvement," Ms. Graham said.
"It's a balancing act. We have a journalism program, but you've got to keep an eye on everything."
