Welcome to PRAIRIE VOICE

Welcome to Prairie Voice, the BLOG I've just created to "spread the word" about the concerns, activities, and Teacher Consultant Achievements at Prairie Lands Writing Project (PLWP) located in St. Joseph, MO.

We have a WHOPPING concern these days at PLWP because Congress and the President wrote the National Writing Project out of the federal 2011 budget back in March. Suddenly, we are faced with the loss of our federal moneys that we match with local revenue sources. For example, during the calendar year which ended August 31, 2010, we matched our federal grant moneys of $66,000 allocated through the National Writing Project with $82,706.12 in local funding. These funds allowed us to offer 73 separate literacy programs which reached 1575 teachers, pre-service teachers and youth, for a total of 19, 920 program contact hours! While I am cautiously optimistic that Prairie Lands will not completely disappear when we've spent down our remaining federal dollars, our presence in northwest Missouri is likely to be greatly diminished. And even more worrisome to me is the fate of our National Writing Project (NWP) upon which we rely so heavily here at Prairie Lands for inspiration and innovation in developing and nurturing our programs. Just since January, ten of our Teacher Consultants (TCs) have completed an online book study based on NWP's Because Digital Writing Matters, TCs Kathy Miller and Deb Schwebach have participated in the NWP's Rural Sites Network Conference held in Little Rock, AR, on literacy learning in rural settings, and we have launched our 2011 NWP Invitational Institute, which will bring 14 area teachers to Missouri Western for a summer of writing, teaching writing, and literacy research. These programs were only possible because of the NWP!