Fla. Students "Survivin' Ivan" with Pensacola Paper

By: Mark Fitzgerald School's out in hurricane-ravaged Escambia County, Fla.--but kids won't fall behind in their learning because of a unique home-schooling program created by the Newspaper In Education (NIE) director of the Pensacola News Journal.

In their mailboxes Wednesday, some 46,000 students in 30,000 households will get an NIE lesson plan and a copy of the News Journal to use in learning math, reading, and writing. The lesson plan is the first of eight curriculum tabloids the News Journal will mail over the next two weeks in a unique partnership with the Escambia County School District.

Entitled "Survivin' Ivan," the first lesson plan asks elementary school kids to record their experiences during the ferocious Sept. 15-16 hurricane that badly damaged schools in the Panhandle county. Middle school and high school students will be asked to search the newspaper for articles related to several civics themes.

News Journal NIE Director Shiela Reed said the "Survivin' Ivan" idea came to her at a meeting where district officials were fretting that the long absence from classrooms--schools are expected to stay shut until Oct. 11--would essentially wipe out any educational progress since the beginning of the year. In a state where standardized tests are extremely important, officials worried that students would do poorly on the springtime exams.

"You saw this look of despair, almost, on their faces. They had a problem and couldn't think of a solution," Reed told E&P. "When I came to them with this, they jumped all over it."

The district is paying the cost of the program with a mixture of county and federal emergency aid plus some private donations. The school board also loaned Reed eight curriculum experts to create the materials.
Florida Gov. Jeb Bush told The Associated Press that "Survivin' Ivan" was "one of the most creative ideas I've ever heard."

Though Reed has been exhausted working to get the materials out quickly, the News Journal NIE program is used to big projects. In normal times its NIE material is used each week in more than 1,200 classrooms in two counties. Each year the program distributes 1.1 NIE lesson plans and newspapers, Reed said.