At Least I Have Each Other

Every year the kids in our schools here prepare and submit work for the Language Arts Department Fair.
 Last year David took close to a dozen first place prizes for various formats of writing--poetry formats, short stories, etc.

This year Joe won the prestigious Writer's Hall of Fame award.  

From all the schools competing in the Language Art Fair, a handful of students are selected for this award to recognize the top writers from our area.  

Joe's award was for a short poem called a tanka.  The title of his poem was "At Least I Have Each Other".
Joe had another entry that actually won another Writer's Hall of Fame award but was disqualified on the grounds of plagiarism due to his forgetting to cite for a line of lyric he used from a published song.  

The thing Joe most enjoyed about this experience was watching several of his classmates work and sweat and agonize over their work--writing and rewriting, begging help from the teachers--over the course of many weeks, trying to achieve perfection.  Joe remembered the assignment at the last minute and threw it together the night before it was due to be turned in.  That's my Joe!

The students who won this award were honored at an awards banquet held in Springfield.  Each student was called to the front of the room, given their award, and a cast of actors read the work of the student.
Our school had more students represented in the awards ceremony than any other school there!