alumni today
EDUCATION
Reading the Situation
In 2006, N.C. Superior Court Judge Howard
Manning ’ 65 included Greensboro’s Ben L.
Smith High School on his list of underper-forming schools. Under the federal No Child
Left Behind Act of 2001, failure to meet testing standards could have led to closing the
high school. With a graduation rate hovering
near 54 percent, low attendance and students
from low-income families and 33 native
tongues, the situation presented quite a challenge.
The school turned to Noah Vance Rogers
’ 80 for help. In 2005, the CNN documentary
High Stakes, The Battle To Save Schools featured
work Rogers had done as principal of Lake
Taylor High School in Norfolk,Va. He is
applying the same formula to Smith High
School: Help those children learn to read.
“Over 75 percent of the students at Smith
Noah Vance Rogers ’ 80, center, principal at Ben L. Smith
High School in Greensboro, says improving students’ reading
skills has been the key to academic achievement.
were reading below the sixth-grade level,”
Rogers says, “so if I’m going to change the test
results, I need to teach them to read.”
Rogers speaks from experience. “When I got
to Carolina,” he says, “I realized that those professors were giving me a lot of books in class. I
went to the Y and signed up for a reading program. Recognizing the need for reading proficiency was the key. It allowed me to graduate in
three years, and now I am a school principal.”
To meet his goals at Smith, Rogers has won
RITA CHRISTIE
a $600,000 renewable grant from the U.S.
Department of Education. Rogers is spending
the money on Read 180, an individualized
program backed by new computers, new
courses, two full-time curriculum coaches, an
intensive outreach to parents and two mentor-ship programs. “I asked the teachers to select
the most challenging children,” Rogers says,
describing his Adopt-an-Eagle effort. “Then I
let each child tell me who was their favorite
teacher, and that teacher becomes their mentor. That teacher meets with that student every
day.”
The second mentoring program, Stay Up
While You Are Out, catches the kids who are
not in school. Students suspended from school
can go down the street to Ebenezer Baptist
Church, where some of the same women who
taught Rogers in Sunday school conduct daily
tutoring sessions.
Most of all, Rogers succeeds by being on
hand. “My office door is always open,” he says,
adding with a warm laugh: “I am claustrophobic, so I can’t close it.”
WRITING
Detour to Success
You could say that Hasanthika “Hansi”
Sirisena ’ 93 became a fiction writer by accident. It was 1999, and the New York resident
had signed up for a course at the Gotham
Writers’Workshop.
“I took it on a whim,” Sirisena says. “I had
signed up for the nonfiction class and went to
the wrong room, but after the first lecture I
decided to stay on. I am a big reader, but I
didn’t have any idea how to begin to start a
fiction story. The teacher said, ‘Start off with a
conflict.’And I thought, that makes sense.”
Sirisena still has a copy of her first story, “a
not-so-good story about a couple and their
vacation on Ocracoke Island,” she says with a
laugh. Now a more sure-footed writer who
works confidently with ideas rooted in her
experience as a Sri Lankan-American, Sirisena
has been published in 2005 Best New American
STAR BLACK
Voices, Epoch, Witness and Rona Jaffe Foundation are based
the 2007 Annual Short Story on anonymous nominations
Quarterly. from people all over the world,”
Sirisena, who also earned Sirisena says. “So when I
a master of fine arts degree received a FedEx package one
in 2006 from City College day with the Rona Jaffe return
of New York, credits her address, I almost fainted because
success to her experience as I knew about the reward and the
a grant writer, a job that amount.”
gives her a balanced per- The package contained
spective on the dispropor- instructions for submitting a
tionate relationship of proposal. Sirisena presented a
Hasanthika Sirisena ’ 93 will use her
rejection notices to awards. plan to use the $25,000 award to
$25,000 Rona Jaffe Foundation award
to live in Sri Lanka and write stories
about the effects of its civil war.
Sirisena emphasizes that her live in Sri Lanka and research
skills in writing fiction are and write a collection of short
rooted in just plain writing well. “I was a phi- stories about the impact of the Sri Lankan civil
losophy major,” she says about her studies at war on different populations. She also will fin-UNC. “I studied with Richard Smyth and ish a novel, Edenboro, a story set in a “
nonspe-Robert Vance. Even though it was not fiction, cific” area of the South with some telltale
they taught me how to put things in words.” North Carolina characteristics.
Still, nothing had quite prepared Sirisena for It’s an ambitious plan, but with the commit-a spot as a winner of a 2008 Rona Jaffe ment of a winner, Sirisena is ready for the
Foundation Writer’s Award. “Awards from the journey.
