Hartselle celebrates Read Across America
Editor’s note: This is one in a series of articles marking the 50th Anniversary of Hartselle City Schools.
Along with other elementary schools, Barkley Bridge Ele mentary School celebrated Read Across America with a special assembly on Monday, March 3. The event showcased the work of several students who had won literacy-based competitions leading up to the day’s culminating event. Library Media Specialist Jamie Dutton, Principal Laura Lamb, and Music Teacher Dr. Beth Davis took the stage to lead the event which included songs by the Barkley Bridge chorus. The event was attended by Mayor Randy Garrison, Superintendent Dr. Brian Clayton, school board members, supportive partners in education, supportive PTO parents, retired BBES educators, and more.
In unison, the K-4 students took an oath to become better readers: I promise to read each day and each night I know it’s the key to growing up right.
I’ll read to myself; I’ll read to a crowd.
It makes no difference if silent or loud.
I’ll read at my desk, at home, and at school, On my bean bag or bed, by the fire or pool.
Each book that I read puts smarts in my head.
Brains grow more thoughts the more they are fed.
So I take this oath to make reading my way Of feeding my brain what it needs every day.
Hartselle City Schools invests in reading training for its teachers and in reading instruction for its students. Reading begins with exposure to sounds, words, phrases, rhymes, and even pictures. But reading does not end with calling the words that appear on the page, reading ends when students can actively take in the words and consider them in relation to other text and to other experiences even as they are in the process of taking in the information.
Our schools have gotten better at teaching reading, because the science of learning and reading provides us with more strategies than we have ever had before. But one thing that is as true today as it was 50 years ago and in the years before that is that a student must engage in the work in order to grow from the work. And celebrations, like Read Across America, are part of how our schools work to engage students.
The May 7, 1992 issue of the Hartselle Enquirer featured a front page photograph of then-Crestline Principal Loy Greenhill and then-Assistant Principal Bobbie Long standing on the Crestline Elementary School rooftop dressed as Uncle Sam and as the Statue of Liberty. They had entered into a pact with that year’s first-graders at the beginning of the school year, and those students had held up their end of the bargain by reading well over 2,000 books in that school year and then demonstrating their understanding of the text they read. Helen Hunt, the wife of then-Governnor Guy Hunt, was in attendance and read to students. That class of first grade students graduated in 2003.
Assemblies and guest speakers and special programs and competitions take work; but Hartselle’s teachers and other stakeholders are willing to invest the minutes into the lives and futures of their children. In 1992, Greenhill insisted he would happily climb to the rooftop in costume again if it would benefit the students under his watch. It was obvious that Dutton and Lamb felt the same in their assembly on March 3. Because brains grow more thoughts the more they are fed.
