DOORWAYS TO VISION

Empowering Students & TeachersThrough Enhanced Verbal Skills (Secrets of the Border Voices Poetry Project)

A Bit of Rhythm + a Bit of Rhyme

Bring Students’ Grades in Line

A Great Inheritance: The Gift of Words

WAITING IN THE WINGS: Amy Glassford, age 10, clutched her book of poems while waiting her turn to recite at the Border Voices Poetry Fair at San Diego State University.

How Border Voices BoostedTest Scores at Pershing Middle

2001-2003

Story Behind Pershing Success

Border Voices poets first knew they were doing something right when teachers at Pershing Middle School began to cry during their lunch hour.

“We’d bring poems our kids had written, and instead of talking about food or whatever, we’d be talking about how the Border Voices poets got kids to write who never wrote before,” said one teacher. “We were bringing poems in and sharing and crying. It was unbelievable! The poets changed our lunches!”

The poets also changed the culture of the entire school, according to principal Sarah Sullivan. Sullivan reported “huge and continuing increases in scores on standardized English tests” even after intensive school-wide workshops ended, and even among students who entered the school in later years. She attributed the continuing increases to teachers adopting Border Voices methods of presenting creative writing. She also said the workshops resulted in a new collegiality among the faculty and a campus-wide “educational Renaissance.”

How to bring a poet to school!

Welcome to Border Voices

FILLED WITH DELIGHT: Three Border Voices students experience the joy of poetry. From left, they are Jenny Garstany, age 11, writing on the poetry wall at a Border Voices fair; Berenice. Palafox. Luzanilla, age 10, from

the Tijuana orphanage Aldea. Infantil SOS; and Michelle Zhang, leaping for joy after her poem “A Bad Algebra Test” won first-place in the middle school division.

Memories & Anticipation At left – the most recent Border Voices anthology. Below, Maya Angelou, who filled San Diego’s Cox Arena at a Border Voices event.