Local students honored for being district winners

COVINGTON Corinth Elementary School fifth grader Taylor Covington and Blacksburg Middle eighth grader Hannah Strong have been honored as this year's district winners in the State Superintendent's Writing Award program.

The students are among 137 fifth and eighth grade district winners selected by a panel of readers for their essays on the topic of financial literacy.

The South Carolina Department of Education sponsored the writing program for the first time this year. The writing program was formerly done through the Office of the Lieutenant Governor.

Fifth graders were asked to write this year's essay on how saving money contributes to financial well-being. Eighth grade writers had this topic to consider:

"Think about the current economic crisis in our country. Why it is important that every individual be responsible for personal financial decisions."

District winners are invited to participate in a summer writing institute to be held June 23 at Irmo Middle School.

At Blacksburg Middle, Strong received school recognition on several occasions for her poetry and prose works.

STRONG "Hannah is an outstanding writer and has been a very good student," Blacksburg Middle School Assistant Principal Courtney Johns said. "We are very proud of her for her accomplishments in writing."

Essays submitted for the State Superintendent Writing Awards were judged on their content and development, organization, vocabulary, and on the writer's grammar, punctuation and spelling.

Weighty essay topics were nothing new for Covington when it came to writing at Corinth Elementary. She won the district's Veterans Day Essay contest four straight years, this year's Martin Luther King Essay contest and received a district award for prose writing.

Corinth Elementary Principal Brenda Sharts presented Covington with an Outstanding Writing Achievement Award at the school's awards ceremony in late May.

"Taylor is an outstanding writer and wellrounded student," Sharts said. "It will be hard for other students to live up to the expectations Taylor has set as a writer dating back to when she was in the second grade."