Want to make possible a system that helps hundreds of parents write letters to their child every year about their dreams for their child and sharing family history stories? Imagine the priceless family conversations such letters could generate!
Want to help children write their plans for their own futures every year during the decade before they graduate high school? Imagine if you had copies of such plans you had written from 3rd through 12th grade! Would you be a different person because of such a future focus?
Want to help parents connect their children with their family roots, their history? Imagine if you now had such written family stories from your parents, grandparents, and other relatives. Imagine the value of such written family stories! Imagine the stories that went to the grave with your older relatives as no grandchild, niece or nephew had asked for stories from family history to be written in letters back to them.
Want to help students experience the power of writing?
This writing exercise, carried forward year to year by your volunteer "Time Capsule Postmaster" work, will show students the power of writing. Writing is too often the weakest link in the education of our students!
These goals are possible!
Simply helping letters that students, parents, and other important relatives write, to get back to the student a year, or a decade later, makes it all possible!
Imagine handing out year-old letters to 5th graders. Year-old letters are very old to such students.
Volunteer School Time Capsule Postmasters are needed to help these goals be achieved! Their work makes a system possible that focuses both students and parents on their own roots & goals, year by year, from pre-k through graduation. They help the 10-year class reunions happen!
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| Some of those attending the ten-year reunion May 2, 2017 for Quintanilla's 8th grade class from 2007. |
Each postmaster invests possibly 50 hours a year helping store hundreds, if not thousands of letters parents and students write for the School Time Capsule Vault, a large 500 to 700-pound vault usually placed in the school lobby, a place students and parents pass it as often as possible.
If their local school does not yet have a vault and a School Time Capsule Project, they can help raise the $900 needed with the PTA. The fundraising process helps introduce parents to the project. The school can now order the 700-pound vault from Costco.com, delivered, for $900. The postmaster(s) helps train school staff, especially the Language Arts teachers, about this set of two annual writing projects for students.
It begins with pre-k enrollment when each parent is asked to write a letter to their child about their dreams for them. The letters are written each year and go into the vault in the envelope for each child.
This process changes by the third grade when two annual writing assignments begin. Students write a letter to each of their parents, and may expand in later years to favorite relatives, especially grandparents. Students write to ask for letters back about dreams the writers have for the student and for a story from the writer's personal history.
Students should always immediately read letters they receive back. They then ask the writer any questions they may have. Hopefully this will lead to those priceless conversations we should have more often with our children and grandchildren.
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Honorable Trini Garza, former DISD Trustee and Bill Betzen on 1-17-19,
with the old 2005 Quintanilla vault and the new 700-pound vault.
Too many letters for the old vault! Nice problem! Since 2015 Quintanilla has
consistently remained one of the 5 best of all 33 DISD middle schools. |
The second writing class is when students prepare the self-addressed envelope to hold the letters collected. Then the student writes a letter to themselves about their own plans for the future while the postmaster and teacher double check addresses on the envelopes.
(Such accuracy is critical!)
A year is a very long time. Students change significantly. Thus the "Time Capsule" term is appropriate from the perspective of both the student, and their parents who see the massive year-to-year changes every child's life reflects.
Postmaster(s) make this system possible. They manage the archiving system so that they can personally hand back to each student the envelope they prepared a year earlier. They will see that twinkle in the student's eye as students try to remember what they wrote a year earlier.
The letter writing starts as parents write their first letter to their child about their dreams for them. This letter goes with the pre-k application. It is the first of 14 annual letters to their child about their dreams for them. These letters will develop and gain detail as their child grows.
The Postmaster(s) will also help for the special 10-year-in-the-future dreams and plans that happen in the 8th grade, and then again in the 12th grade. They will ultimately be helping to coordinate those 10-year 8th grade and 12th grade class reunions. At the high school level they may simply staff the "Time Capsule Table" at the traditional high school 10-year reunion. They will pass back the letters written 10-years earlier.
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2015 was first 10-year reunion for the first Time Capsule Project Class of 2005.
2015 was also the year Quintanilla had the highest DISD School Effectiveness
Indices (SEI) Score of any DISD middle school, for the first time! System
improvements now speed up such improvement to three years, not 10. |
I personally consider this to be the most rewarding volunteer work possible. You will see a school change before your very eyes! Your work allows students to begin to know in more detail their own family roots and make their own plans for the future, updating their plans every year.
Grades and behavior both improve! Student confidence grows! Then you see tears of joy at the class reunions as they are thankful and celebrate what they have achieved.
Please call the Dallas ISD Volunteer Center (972-925-5440) about becoming a Time Capsule Postmaster. You may even help start such a project in a school you want to change. Use the word "Postmaster" and they will know what you are calling about.
To see more details about the project, read the manual that is found at
www.StudentMotivation.org.
This is an open source project that is ran independently by each school. We only ask that Project improvements discovered be shared.
Bill Betzen,
bbetzen@aol.com
