Maya Marshall (l) and Robin Reagler enjoying a book of poetry

Writers in the Schools (WITS) sends novelists, poets and journalists into schools to help children learn how to think. Executive director Robin Reagler says, “When the kids first start out, they don’t realize that through the act of writing they can figure out what they think. It’s like thinking on paper, a way of processing ideas and sorting them out.”

But it’s not all work; the program is fun. “We engage children in the pleasure and power of reading and writing,” Ms. Reagler explains. “When we wrote our mission statement, the idea of pleasure was just as important as power.”

She continues, “A writer goes into the classroom for one hour each week, and the same writer comes each time throughout the year, so the students develop trust and take risks, both in what they write about and how they write it. Each visit, the kids are confronted with something surprising or a little weird. They might see a Surrealist painting for the first time and be asked to write a story about it. If the story is about riding the bus to school that day, maybe they will tell that story based on everything they smelled that morning. Kids are thrust into a situation in which they have to create something original, because the answers aren’t obvious. We hope by the end of the class that a student has discovered
lots of ways to tell a story.”

Maya Marshall, a senior at Lamar High School, has participated in several WITS programs and now is an aspiring poet. She says, “It was a springboard for me to be creative. It also taught me how to do writing exercises. Before WITS, if I got a certain idea, I’d write something down. I could use alliteration, I could use the techniques I learned in English class. But with WITS, I learned how to write with other writers.

“WITS also showed me that I can have a future in writing,” Ms. Marshall explains. “I may be really hungry, because usually you don’t make a lot of money being any type of artist, much less a poet, but I’ll be doing what I love, and I found out there are ways it can be done.”

WITS emerged from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program in 1983, when five writers worked in five schools. Today, 64 writers visit 80 schools annually, with 20 additional schools on the waiting list. Refusing to take all of the credit, Ms. Reagler reports, “We found that schools that had our program for three to five years increased TAAS writing scores between 15 and 40 percent.” In addition to teaching in schools, WITS also brings its programs to juvenile detention centers, homeless shelters and GED classrooms.

“We always are looking for people who can bring writing to life for children in very exciting ways, and who can help put kids in a place where they really enjoy reading and writing,” says Ms. Reagler. “We don’t teach students how to spell, and we don’t teach them grammar. But we can take them to a point where they can enjoy sitting down and writing a story and playing with words the same way a sculptor plays with clay. Students frequently discover they can have a good time reading a book, which I think is a great accomplishment.”

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