Celebrate Schools

On a recent Tuesday, for the final time, I drove my students to The Ledger's Lakeland office to finish our page for the April edition of your Celebrate Schools campus pages. I didn't know it was the last time when we started out that morning. But - staffing decisions, budget cuts - there's always bad news in the newsroom. Still, it came as a surprise. A heavy thud, really.

It resonates still.

For five years, I have been the adviser for Frostproof Middle Senior High's campus pages' reporters. Many students have made the hour-and-a-half trek to Lakeland with me. In the first three years, students rotated in and out of the editions, and I was always rushing to teach newbies proper style, format and interviewing techniques, and editing just in time for the next deadline. But these past two years, I have been working with the same reporters and, this year, my son joined the team.

Still, our days at The Ledger have always been preceded by several weeks of hectic flurry to get so many things done. Besides our after-school meetings to discuss and assign stories (then the coaching and revising, and reassuring and nagging, and, finally, editing) there was always the tedious litany of other "things:" finding teachers to volunteer to cover my classes for the day (and thank heavens FMSHS has so many kind and generous teachers), rearranging lesson plans, borrowing a van to transport the kids and - the bane of my professional existence - field trip paperwork.

Rarely does a teacher get to see her work come to fruition outside the walls of the classroom. Usually, we are left with a hope that one day what we have said or done will be remembered. But these past few years of late-night editing and last-minute fact-checking have allowed me to watch a small group of kids grow into competent writers who are aware of and concerned about the world they are a part of.

Ledger readership, I hope you took your opportunity to read and celebrate while this section lasted. I hope you'll miss it when it's gone, note the loss and look hard to find the good that will still be there in the classrooms.

It is ironic that I never thought about it before now - I celebrated school on our Ledger days. And, whether they knew it or not, my students did too. Thank you for the opportunity. Thank you for the celebration.

JULIE KEY SPIRES

Teacher

Frostproof Middle Senior High School

Frostproof

Editor's Note: The last edition of the stand-alone Celebrate Schools section published in April. Teachers overseeing contributing writers have been invited to have their students participate online when the new school year starts in August through www.polkvoice.com. The best stories submitted to that Web site are used in a weekly print edition by the same name.