Newspapers In Education: A window to the world
The Yuma Sun needs your help to deliver its newspapers to classrooms for use as “living textbooks.” Here’s how you can support the mission:
• Community fundraisers
• Taste of Home cooking show: This professional cooking demonstration educates and entertains every fall.
• Calendars: Our baby and pet calendars are highly interactive. Readers submit and vote on photos, and the most popular get printed in the calendar.
• Applebee’s pancake breakfast: Coming up in the fall, this partnership with Yuma’s Applebee’s restaurants will feature pancake breakfasts simultaneously at all three locations. Students and teachers will be there, too.
• Sign on for Literacy: Acknowledge that Yuma County has an illiteracy problem and pledge to fight it. Adults and kids lend their signatures, and $5 (adults) or $2 in quarters (students). One school and classroom will be awarded a pizza party for top participation. Signatures will be printed in the Yuma Sun. This fundraiser begins in late September.
• Sponsorship: Currently, the Yuma Sun’s NIE has 26 sponsors. Businesses, civic organizations and individuals can all give in one-year commitments. Sponsors can be gold ($1,000 or more), silver ($500-$1,000), bronze ($150-$500) and copper (less than $150). Also, the new Business Partner program is a $600 package that includes logo-featured “appreciation ads,” placement on our website, business cards, a framed certificate of recognition, an ad in the monthly NIE Business Partner section, and recognition and participation opportunities at promotional events.
• Adopt-a-Kid or Adopt-a-Classroom: Cover the cost of one student’s newspaper (one newspaper per week): $5 per semester or $10 per year. Or you can pay for one classroom of about 30 students each, giving each student one newspaper per week: $120 per semester or $240 per year.
Contact Karen Phillips at 539-6806 to give.
A newspaper is a shelf of textbooks rolled into one, updated daily and easy to get.
The nonprofit Newspapers in Education, or NIE, applies newspapers' tremendous versatility and accessibility with its youth-friendly way of using newspapers to teach not just reading skills, but math, critical thinking and other classroom subjects like social studies, geography and science.
NIE provides newspapers and complementary educational materials and lesson plans to K-12 schools as well as colleges, adult literacy programs, youth detention centers and other learning programs. Here in Yuma and environs, teachers from Dateland to San Luis are encouraged to use the Yuma Sun in classroom lessons.
Over the next few days, the Yuma Sun will introduce you to its own Newspapers in Education program and let you know how you can help it maintain a wide reach in schools across Yuma County.
Karen Phillips, the Yuma Sun's NIE manager, said Yuma is traditionally a very generous community, and she encouraged people to give to education through NIE.
Phillips has been at the Yuma Sun for 27 years, and NIE was around when she first arrived -- and it wasn't new at the time, either.
Newspapers are versatile, up-to-date, inexpensive, and fun, and they get kids involved in their community.
“Why wouldn't somebody want to learn from a newspaper?” she said.
Taxes do fund education, including traditional textbooks, but a program like NIE relies on private support.
Newspaper industry regulations mean that the sponsoring newspaper can only waive half the cost of the newspaper. The other half must be paid for, which requires fundraising. The Yuma Sun is seeking to raise $41,000 to have a full-scale NIE program this school year. Lower revenues mean a smaller program.
This year, the Yuma NIE program will bring services valued at more than $200,000 to Yuma area schools.
In the past, the Yuma Sun's NIE program has partnered with as many as 470 teachers in a school year and delivered more than 13,000 newspapers per week to schools at teacher request.
Teachers can come and go throughout the year. Last year, 182 teachers across the county took the Yuma Sun for NIE.
Right now, about 65 teachers are currently signed up, but awaiting a better picture of funding stability before they begin receiving their papers. Participating teachers receive a newspaper one day a week. Papers are delivered straight to campus, and the Yuma Sun provides teacher workshops.
“We make it as easy for the teachers as possible,” Phillips said.
Newspapers in Education is a worldwide program, with a presence not just in Yuma. More than 700 newspapers across North America have an NIE program. There's an NIE in Detroit, Phoenix, Minneapolis, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and San Diego; Palm Beach, Fla., Austin, Texas and Fargo N.D.; Erie, Penn., Pueblo, Colo. and Kane County, Ill. You'll find NIE in Canada, and you'll find it in New Zealand, too.
Whatever city the newspaper serves, it brings local, regional, national and international current events to the classroom. Recent NIE lesson plans have guided teachers on how to use the newspaper to study the newest Mars rover, fish kills in the Midwest, the Summer Olympics and the shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin.
Visit www.nieonline.com and www.nieinyuma.com to get a glimpse of how Newspapers in Education allows teachers to go in-depth with their newspapers -- and watch this space in the Monday and Tuesday editions of the Yuma Sun to further see how NIE can impact local schools.
Hillary Davis can be reached at hdavis@yumasun.com or 539-6857. Find her on Facebook at Facebook.com/YSHillaryDavis or on Twitter at @YSHillaryDavis.
