Columnist Susan Snyder: Giving kids an honorable opportunity

Tuesday, Aug. 28, 2001 | 8:26 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or 259-4082.

Most people greet the day after returning home from vacation by tripping over the huge pile of laundry dumped from the suitcases and assessing the damage to neglected house plants.

Not Lynn Goya. With sand from Hawaii's beaches still fresh in her kids' clothes, the Boulder City woman was on the telephone trying to figure out where she was going to get $10,000.

The money, she says, is needed to start up a Southern Nevada regional office for the Scholastic Arts and Writing Awards, sponsored by Scholastics Books. That's the company that publishes the Scholastics magazine so familiar in school classrooms.

The annual competition is open to students in grades seven through 12 who compete in visual fine arts and writing categories. Students vie for more than 600 national honorary titles, while graduating seniors can win up to $20,000 for fine arts or $10,000 for writing.

The competition attracts about 25,000 entries from 80 regional sponsors nationwide and is considered the most prestigious student arts and literary award in the country, Goya said.

But Southern Nevada pupils often can't or don't enter because the area doesn't have a regional contest. So students from Clark County -- the nation's sixth-largest school district -- must find out about the scholarship contest on their own and fork over the $60 entry fee.

"Without a regional contest they go into a national slush pile," Goya said. "They compete, but they don't get any regional recognition or local recognition. If they don't win (nationally) they get nothing."

That's not good enough, Goya said. Even a regional or local Scholastics certificate looks good on a college application. Right now, only fine arts students in some areas of Northern Nevada have a shot at local kudos. Last year's national contest shows only five Nevada entries.

Goya hopes to start with a writers' contest and expand to fine arts later. She already has been plugging away at the idea for two years. And she generally gets what she wants.

In 1996 she led the movement for creation of the Boulder City Youth Advocacy Council, which she heads from her home. Since then the council has opened a youth center, organized a child identification program and helped police and school officials come up with a safe school drop-off zone.

Now she is reaching beyond the boundaries of her tiny desert town in hopes of offering recognition to pupils as far away as Indian Springs and maybe even those in of Nye and Esmeralda counties.

She has gained the support of KNPR 89.5-FM, which has offered to air some of the winning compositions, and from such groups as the Clark County Community Education Foundation and the Las Vegas Art Museum.

Once the start-up money is scraped together, there will be entry guidelines and procedures to write, and someone will have to ride herd over it all. Goya isn't stepping forward for that. Yet.

"Why shouldn't our kids have the opportunity to put on their resumes they're national Scholastics winners?" she said. "I just can't give it up. I just can't stand that they haven't got this."

We need such people as Goya. They do stuff -- even when it means the laundry will have to wait.