Young writers will be descending on Cleveland Heights this winter, with both middle schools hosting Power of the Pen competitions in t
he new year.
The unique opportunity has been awarded to Monticello and Roxboro Middle Schools in part because the geographic location of our district allows schools to choose which Power of the Pen District Tournaments to compete in. Monticello is competing in and hosting the Lake Erie District 2 Tournament on January 11th, while Roxboro is competing in and hosting the Northern District 2 Tournament on February 1st.
Teams and individual students who do well at either of these competitions will move on to the Regional Tournaments – at Solon Middle School on March 15 for Monticello and at St. Charles Borromeo Parish School on March 8 for Roxboro. The first time writers from the two schools could face off against one another would be at the State Tournament at Ashland University in May.
You may wonder how on earth creative writing can be turned into a competitive sport. Power of the Pen tournaments consist of 7th and 8th grade teams from nearly two dozen middle schools competing in multiple rounds of “speed writing.” Students are clustered in classrooms where they are presented with a prompt and then have to craft a cohesive, creative story in 40 minutes.
Judges, usually teachers, advisers, and parents who’ve completed an online training course, use a rubric to score and rank the anonymous stories based on creativity, voice/unity of writing style, figurative/descriptive language, structure/ideas, paragraph and sentence structure, and spelling and mechanics. Students then move to another room and go through the process all over again, this time with a different prompt.
After each of the three rounds concludes, “runners” carry the score sheets to the Tab Room – basically ground zero for Power of the Pen, w
here volunteers frantically tabulate all the scores of the hundreds of stories to determine overall team and individual winners.
And you can help! Both Monticello and Roxboro are looking for volunteers to work in their respective Tab Rooms, as well as oversee the student runners throughout the day. Tab Room volunteers don’t need to be experts at writing as they won’t be judging or scoring any stories, they’ll simply be adding up the various scores for each competitor. A brief training – and of course, food – will be provided to volunteers.
Suzanne Nelson, a Gifted Intervention Specialist who coaches the Rox team, and Jeannise Andres, a Math/ELA Support Specialist at Noble, who oversees the Monticello team, are both excited to showcase their schools and especially their students. As a former Monticello student herself, Andres “is so passionate about bringing this opportunity to our kids.”
“These kids are enthusiastic and dedicated writers,” she says of the two dozen students on the team. “They are showing up and they are just the sweetest kids.”
Nelson feels the same about her group at Roxboro. “They’re a very talented, clever and funny group of writers,” she says. “What I love most about them is that they’re all super supportive of each other and give each other so much encouragement.”
Both Power of the Pen teams need that same level of support and encouragement from the community: in the form of volunteer hours, financial sponsorship and/or food to feed coaches and volunteers. Sponsors will be mentioned in any promotional materials and are invited to have a table at the actual event.
Andres is thankful for the help of former Monticello teacher and Power of the Pen advisor Deborah frost, her two coaches Candace Summers and Stephanie Norman, and her mom Jeannetta Russell, herself a former Noble teacher, who has donated to the cause.
If you or your business are able to volunteer or sponsor these special district events, please reach out to Jeannise Andres at 216-371-6520 or
[email protected] or Suzanne Nelson at 216-371-7171 x82360 or
[email protected].