Pen pals: A coast-to-coast dialogue

Nick Freelove and his Everett classmates are sending pencils and warm thoughts to New York kids affected by the Sept. 11 attacks

By Eric Stevick

Herald Writer

EVERETT — It’s a simple and powerful tool that students at Garfield and Jackson elementary schools are sending with short hand-printed letters and a homemade video to Public School No. 114 in the Bronx.

For the Everett students, the pencil is a symbol of communication and caring in its many shades and varying lengths.

Garfield and Jackson students are mailing pencils they brought from their homes to a school in a city where the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 are still much on the minds of the children. The hope is to begin a coast-to-coast dialogue.

"Dear Friend," wrote Garfield fourth-grader Nick Freelove, underscoring the power of the No. 2 pencil he donated from his plastic pencil pouch. "The yellow on this pencil is to brighten up your life, the eraser is to erase your sadness and the silver is to give you a little glimmer of hope."

Barb Dubin, a Garfield social worker, believes the exercise will help students on both sides of the country grasp an atrocity they will never forget.

"We are always going to remember this event in our life but it would be helpful if you could always remember that you did something positive … to pair with what happened," Dubin said.

Nick Freelove knows what he saw on the television afterward, and he can come close to reciting the death toll. However, like a lot of 9-year-olds, there is much he doesn’t understand, such as the distance to New York — "a couple of days by plane" and "by car a couple of weeks."

What he does understand is sorrow.

"Some of them are still sad," he said.

In reality, the children’s thoughts are also helping adults.

For Dubin, there is hope and wisdom in the innocent words of children such as Nick. She, too, has extended family that has been affected: her cousin’s boyfriend, a New York firefighter, died in the rubble.

The Everett school children just want their East Coast peers to know they are thinking about them, Dubin said.

For the thousand students in Public School 114 the horror was in their city but not their back yard.

The Everett schools chose a campus that is not on the fringe of Ground Zero, the neighborhood where the terrorist-hijacked jets crashed into the World Trade Center towers. Public School 114, which uses the same reading program as Garfield and Jackson, is in a neighborhood that runs along the Hudson River behind Yankee Stadium.

It is a three-story school that was built more than 60 years ago. During that time, according to a profile in Atlantic Monthly magazine, the community has changed from all white to mostly black to mostly Puerto Rican to mostly Dominican.

Karen Miller, principal at Garfield, sees good in the short and simple writing exercise that goes beyond test scores. To her, there was a lesson in empathy and resiliency.

"In reality, out of all of this, good things are happening and the kids are rising to the occasion," she said.

You can call Herald Writer Eric Stevick at 425-339-3446

or send e-mail to stevick@heraldnet.com.

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