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ALLENTOWN: Reading milestone celebrated at Newell

Students earn Top 20 honors in world summer reading challenge

By Joanne Degnan, Managing Editor
   ALLENTOWN — They could have dunked her, but they voted instead for a dye job and a song and dance.
   Newell Elementary School Principal Kelly Huggins, who had made a deal with her students to “do something spectacular and crazy” if they met their goals in the Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge, kept her promise Friday.
   To celebrate her students’ achievement of spending 830,776 minutes reading — a feat that placed Newell among the top 20 schools in the worldwide contest — Mrs. Huggins allowed the kids to spray her hair purple and green and then took the stage for a spirited karaoke performance of “I Will Survive.”
   More than 500 students waving red “We’re No. 1” foam fingers cheered her on, including 120 fifth-graders who were bused back from Stone Bridge Middle School for the event because they had participated in the Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge, held May 1 to Aug. 31, as fourth-graders.
   ”They got to choose what it was they wanted me to do,” Mrs. Huggins explained last week. “The three options were the dunk tank, dying my hair a different color, whatever choice they wanted, and singing karaoke.”
   Although she thought the dunk tank would be the top vote-getter, it turned out the students were more keen to see if she could carry a tune. The original plan was to show the students a video of their singing principal, but she scrapped that for a live performance at a school-wide assembly and threw in the dyed hair as a bonus.
   ”I figured if I was going to be making a fool of myself with one person taping me, I might as well do it front of the whole student body,” Mrs. Huggins said.
   Newell joined the Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge to combat “the summer slide” in reading skills, Mrs. Huggins said. Teachers and administrators were finding that children were regressing one or two reading levels between June and September and thought the competition would be a fun way to encourage summer reading that would help keep their students’ skills sharp.
   ”So we put it out there to them as challenge that if we read as a school 552,000 minutes from May 1 to Aug. 31 that I would do something spectacular and crazy of their choosing,” Mrs. Huggins said.
   After the K-4 students met and surpassed that original reading goal on July 20, with still a month left to go in the contest, the principal issued a second challenge: 800,000 minutes. Her students surpassed that goal as well, finishing 17th in both the nation and world in total number of minutes read.
   According to Scholastic, 193,000 students in all 50 states and 25 countries around the world participated in the Summer Reading Challenge by logging the number of minutes they read (or were read to in the case of younger students) each day on Scholastic’s website. Collectively, students around the world read 95.8 million minutes, which is a new record, according to Scholastic.
   The top 20 schools with the most reading minutes, all in the United States, will be featured in the 2013 Scholastic Book of World Records.
   At Friday’s assembly, Newell Elementary School also recognized its top readers in grades K-4 who participated in the reading challenge: Aryn Singh; Matt Moehringer; Kylie Byrne; Marina Harris; and Tommy Kulpa.
   The winners received certificates of recognition and the chance to help spray purple and green dye into the hair of their principal, who donned a plastic black cape and oversize orange sunglasses for her makeover. As the theme song from “Mission Impossible” blared in the background, music teacher Paul Sulyok finished the job to ensure the colors were as bright as the sequins on her costume.
   Then it was show time. Mrs. Huggins grabbed her microphone and belted out the lyrics of Gloria Gaynor’s hit “I Will Survive” — with the lyrics tweaked by Mr. Sulyok to suit the occasion.
“Hey! Hey! I will survive.
Because you read your books, and did your part, and kept this thing alive.
I’m a person of my word,
Though my singing’s for the birds,
I will survive. I will survive.”