Polk County Public Schools
Winners of the 9th Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Essay Contest sponsored by the Community Relations Advisory Council of the Board of County Commissioners and the Polk Public Schools were announced at the annual MLK Breakfast held today at the Bartow Civic Center.
The essay contest theme was “Remember! Celebrate! Act!….. Make it a Day On, Not a Day Off!” First-place winners earned a $1,000 savings bond while second and third place winners earned savings bonds of $500 and $250 respectively. More than 1,400 students submitted essays. Judges from Polk Community College evaluated essays based on content, organization, subject development, word choice, sentence structure, grammar, creativity, originality and other criteria. Winners were chosen in the elementary, middle and high school levels.
First place winners were Cheyenne Bennett (Winter Haven’s Jewett School of the Arts), Ariel Stevenson (Lake Alfred Addair Middle) and Leah Spann (Haines City International Baccalaureate).
Second place winners were Hunter LaFollette (Polk City Elementary), Emily Miles (Lake Wales’ McLaughlin Middle And Fine Arts Academy) and Connor Mastrangelo (Haines City International Baccalaureate).
Third place winners were Christina King (Fort Meade’s Lewis Anna Woodbury Elementary), Chyanne Cumbie (Lakeland Teen Parent) and Adrielle Connor (Bartow International Baccalaureate).
Three students from Winter Haven’s Jewett Middle Academy attended a week-long program of the Congressional Youth Leadership Council (CYLC) and the Junior National Young Leaders Conference (JrNYLC). The program was held in November in Chevy Chase, Md.
The program offered high achieving middle school students the opportunity to learn about leadership, social advocacy and encouraged them to make a positive impact in their homes and communities.
At the conference, students studied aspects of leadership during historical periods and characteristics of leadership. A goal of the program was to help students gain a better understanding of what it takes to become an effective leader.
Jewett Middle students attending the conference were Shivam Patel, Ramonica Radway and Paige Wildstein. Shivam, Ramonica and Paige are all in the eighth grade. James Steele, a faculty member at Jewett Middle, accompanied the students at the conference.
The students wrote a chronological report about what they learned and experienced at the conference and also appeared on Jewett Middle Academy’s in-house television channel discussing the trip.
