April 4, 2011

To Whom it May Concern:

As the in-service coordinator for the Southern Oregon Writing Project, I have had the great pleasure of doing workshops for groups of writing teachers K-12 and have mentored many individual teachers in their own classrooms.  There simply is no better teacher training than NWP’s month long summer institutes.  Teachers come away from these with confidence in their own writing abilities, confidence in their writing instruction capabilities, and a thick notebook of writing plans that lasts a lifetime. They then reach out as teacher consultants and in-service people in their own individual districts, and so the ripples go far far beyond the initial programs that have been for twenty years supported with federal funds. The NWP is by far the biggest bang for the buck in federal educational spending and it is a travesty that it has been cut.

For the sake of all our young students K-12, I urge you to keep the NWP. The writing that students produce, because of the kind of instruction their teachers have had with OWP, is evocative, effective, skilled in all writing traits, and strong in the writers’ voices because of their love for writing.  This kind of teacher training has proven to be effective and inexpensive, and it is essential achieving our goal of having strong writers coming out of high schools across the country.

I urge all members of Congress to change the vote and keep OWP.

 Sincerely,

Ruth Lizotte, In-service Coordinator

Southern Oregon Writing Project