NEWS VOICES
Welcome to News Voices, a weekly feature where members of the WVIA News team will talk with each other — and sometimes sources — about key things we've learned in recent stories we have been working on.
Today, Roger DuPuis sits down with Sarah Hofius Hall to talk about a Luzerne County fifth-grader whose handwriting skills have earned her national attention. Kat Bolus assisted with audio editing.
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ROGER: I'm here with WVIA reporter Sarah Hofius Hall, who is going to talk to us about cursive writing.
SARAH: Hi Roger.
ROGER: Hi Sarah. And so a quick anecdote. I will tell you that when I was in sixth grade, my teacher told my mother I had some promise as a writer, but my handwriting was never, ever going to improve, and she should buy me a typewriter. That is not the case with a young woman from the Lake-Lehman School District in Luzerne County who you interviewed recently.
SARAH: Yes, so I met with Kendall Grabinski. She's a fifth-grade student at Lehman-Jackson Elementary School, and she is the fifth-grade Grand National Champion for cursive writing in the Zaner-Bloser National Handwriting Contest.
ROGER: That's just so impressive, to have somebody from our area who is a national champion, but also in something that a lot of folks don't know how to do anymore. So apparently, it's not required to teach cursive in Pennsylvania, correct?
SARAH: Yes. And I think it's important to point out, too, that she's actually the third national champion from this school since 2020. One was for print handwriting, the other two were for cursive handwriting. But that really says something about the curriculum in that school district. So they start teaching cursive writing in the spring of second grade, and then throughout third grade, the students continue to work on it.
ROGER: Right. And you talked with Kendall teacher, Jen Welby.
SARAH: I did. She said it was kind of like a rite of passage that when students can learn to write in cursive, when they write in script and can read in script, they kind of feel like a big kid.
ROGER: You know what's interesting as we're talking about this, I was looking at your story and some other reporting that's been done, and Representative Dane Watro, who's a state lawmaker from our area, from Schuylkill County, would like to see the state require cursive to be taught. And there are 24 states that require it — of course, as I say, Pennsylvania is not one of them — and one of the reasons folks say that this is important is not only for the students and the cognitive advantages that they develop, but also the ability to read historic documents.
SARAH: That's often highlighted when lawmakers do propose to make it a requirement. I think schools have really kind of gotten away from cursive in the last decade. A lot of schools are starting to bring it back, though, in at least some way — it's not going to be, you know, the kind of lessons maybe we had when we were in school — but they are at least exposed to it in some way in a lot of school districts. The funny thing is that Kendall's teacher told me that she actually didn't realize Kendall had such beautiful handwriting because she usually prints.
ROGER: Oh, wow. And we were talking before we went on the air, and you are very good at cursive, apparently, correct?
SARAH: I am. I'd like to think so.
ROGER: Okay, what does Kendall win as a result of this contest?
SARAH: So, she wins $500 and a trophy from the curriculum company, and then the school receives a $1,000 voucher for different products from the company.
ROGER: Interesting. All right, what was the famous sentence that you saw Kendall write?
SARAH: And this sentence was actually one I was just kind of writing out in my notebook to see how I did! But the sentence is "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." And the fun thing about that sentence is that it actually uses every letter of the alphabet, so you can really judge letter formation, shape the slant of the writing by reviewing that sentence
ROGER: And before we close, there was another student in our area who won an award from Zaner-Bloser, correct?
SARAH: So the way the contest is, they have school winners, and then those school winners go on to have a chance to be a regional winner, and then regional winners advance to the national competition. And for the regional winners. Carson Che, a first-grade student at Notre Dame Elementary in East Stroudsburg, was recognized for his printing skills.
ROGER: Nice. To all our audience out there, if you look at our website, wvia.org, you'll see a digital version of the story, and you can get an idea of just how wonderful Kendall's handwriting can be.
READ MORE ABOUT KENDALL AND CHE: Lake-Lehman fifth grader named national champion for her cursive writing skills
