Student honored in ‘lost art’ of reciting poetry

By Emily Richmond

Sunday, Feb. 8, 2009 | 2 a.m.

With her artful and expressive recitation of two poems by Maya Angelou, Shadow Ridge High School senior Nandi Spencer took first place Friday in the Poetry Out Loud competition, and will represent Clark County in the state finals next month.

Spencer, along with classmates Libby Bakke (second place) and Erica Buitrago

(third place), was coached by teacher Ben Jorgensen.

“I love that poetry makes me feel,” said Spencer, a senior who hopes to attend Spellman College. “When I write it, I can express myself.”

The competition is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, with state winners facing off in Washington, D.C., in April.

Students may choose from poems by a wide range of poets, from William Shakespeare to Elizabeth Barrett Browning to more modern writers.

“For kids this age to memorize a poem and get up in front of an audience and recite it, that’s a remarkable thing today,” said Serrin Anderson, who teaches at College of Southern Nevada High School West, which had three students in the competition. “It’s something of a lost art.”

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With the Clark County School District facing massive budget cuts, every dollar counts. And the state treasurer’s office, which oversees unclaimed property, has checks waiting for local schools.

The unclaimed property includes payments from Nevada businesses that could not be delivered, often because of an incorrect address.

The district has 13 unclaimed payments, totaling about $2,300. Several dozen campuses are also listed, with most amounts totaling less than $100. But several schools have bigger checks waiting for them.

Valley High School Principal Ron Montoya said he was unaware his campus had unclaimed cash until he was contacted by the Sun. That Valley had $1,622.75 from Palace Station, unclaimed since 2004, was an even bigger surprise.

“We can do a lot with it,” Montoya said. “We can pay for some extra tutoring for proficiency tests. There are plenty of good places to spend it.”

Several claims have been lingering for quite a while, including a 2003 payment of $495.14 for J.D. Smith Middle School from Pepsi Co. Doris Reed Elementary School has $219.08 from Coca Cola Enterprises Inc., first issued in 2006.

For Burkholder Middle School, finding out there’s $500 waiting from St. Rose Hospital was welcome news.

“Especially in these tough times, our fundraising hasn’t been as successful as in past years,” Principal Jessie Phee said. “To have $500 we didn’t have before, that’s huge for us.”

The money will be used for student recognition programs, rewarding achievement and improvements in the classroom, Phee said.

Even if schools fail to collect their money it will still go to support students. Unclaimed property is used to support the state’s Millennium Scholarship program.

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The School District will announce Monday that three more campuses are joining the empowerment schools pilot program thanks to donations from Nevada Women’s Philanthropy.

The district wanted to keep the names of the schools a secret until Monday’s formal event. But it didn’t take much sleuthing to deduce that Chaparral High School was on the list, given that it’s the location of the news conference.

The other two new empowerment campuses are Staton and Wendell P. Williams elementary schools, sources told the Sun.

Empowerment schools receive additional per-pupil funding in exchange for meeting tougher accountability measures. Teachers can earn bonuses for meeting a variety of benchmarks, including improving student achievement and receiving positive reviews from parents.

When the state canceled its empowerment schools initiative last year, the district turned to private donors to expand its own version of the initiative, which was launched in 2006 with four schools.

Nevada Women’s Philanthropy’s previously announced $450,000 donation, made through the Public Education Foundation, will provide increased per-pupil funding at the three campuses.

The three new empowerment schools will bring the district’s total to 17.