Currents

Fairytales for Public Schools

Volume 8 / Issue 4 / Summer 2008

The Web site, Once Upon a School, is looking for do-gooders and has the goal of telling 1,000 tales of happy endings for public schools in one year. The site seeks adults and businesses in local communities to identify and commit to a project at a school, develop and execute a plan, and write about the outcome. Once Upon a School has Guidelines and FAQs pages to help in the process. These will be especially helpful for companies or individuals who do not have a personal connection to any schools and are not sure who to approach or how.

The Project Stories pages share the tales of success that have been implemented (78 so far). Not mere fairytales from “Once Upon a Time,” these are true-life stories of everyday heroes who have helped teachers and students and made positive contributions to schools. The stories are summarized by “The Idea,” “The Plan,” “The Execution,” and “The Result” pages and provide inspiration and ideas for action.

Onceuponaschool.org provides plenty of ideas from classroom activities to school-wide initiatives (but you can also post your own idea for a project), such as:

• Sponsor a tutoring room
• Create and (maybe) publish a board game
• Fix up a local school
• Free math tutoring and financial planning
• Healthy kids club
• Build modern media labs, invite professionals to volunteer and train teachers
• No bull(ying)
• Help a school sports team succeed academically
• Online writing mentors
• Start an invention contest!
• Revive a school’s arts program
• Many, many more

The Ideas page features a listing of ideas, a short description of each idea (with a link to more in-depth information), and the total number of pledges per idea. This is a new initiative, so there are lots of “Be the first!” to pledge imperatives—so get online, charge on your steed to a schoolhouse, and make a fairytale come true in your community.

Once Upon a School is the TED award-winning idea of Dave Eggers and is a collaboration of 826 national, several nonprofits that offer expository and creative writing outlets for children 6-18; TED, a conference and Web site with the mission of spreading ideas; and Hot Studio, a design firm..
—Bobbie Collins-Perry