Toot Your Own Horn!

SIXTH GRADERS AT GRACE EPISCOPAL DAY SCHOOL
EARN TOP HONORS AT MARYLAND HISTORY DAY COMPETITION

Grace Episcopal Day School students Eva Branson, Brittani Campbell, Dorothy Hastings and Erin Monahan won top honors at the 8th annual Maryland History Day Competition that was held on March 15th at West Julius Middle School in Rockville. Eleven members of Reginald Will’s sixth grade class at Grace participated in this year’s event. 

Each student received a certificate and a monetary prize for her outstanding research, scholarship and dramatic presentation. In addition, a special invitation to perform was extended to the Grace students by the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History, one of the worlds most well regarded organizations for scholarship in the area of African-American history and culture.

 The winning group wrote and performed a short play entitled, “You’ve Got to Get an Education: Integration of the Montgomery County Schools.” This written play was based loosely on the lives of Nina Clarke and Congresswoman Connie Morella, two women who have first hand experience of integration in the county’s public school system. Ms. Clarke was one of the first African-American teachers to integrate a local school, and Congresswoman Morella was among one of the first teachers to welcome black students into her classroom. Both of these interviews provided Branson, Campbell, Hastings and Monahan with a first-hand account of historical events that took place in Montgomery County Public Schools, and they were able to weave the information they gleaned from these two important women into their winning play.

 “You’ve Got to Get an Education” earned three individual awards: The Charles Jacobs Special Prize for Local History, The Expression of African-American History Prize and the African-American Educational Prize. 

Other Grace students involved in National History Day included Isel Fitzgerald, Isaiah Marshall, Rachel Sandri, Clare Specht, and Alexa Thomas. These sixth grade students worked on a play entitled “Breaking through the Gender Wall: Title IX,” which brought to stage the early life of Jane Sanders who is now the President of Burlington College in Vermont. The play discussed gender discrimination and the struggles of a young girl competing against boys during her early school years.

 Kenny Lawson and James Mitchel created, “A Nation Divided Cannot Stand” a short film based on an interview they conducted with a former Grace parent, Rubina Patel. The film discussed Patel’s childhood growing up in Pakistan and the conflicts between India and Pakistan. 

 This was the Grace Episcopal School’s third year participating in the Maryland History Day competition and Grace competed against 125 other entrants from 20 other schools.

Elissa Carter, a 2007 graduate of Grace and a current student at Calvary Lutheran, captured the top prize in the Junior Individual Exhibit for her project, “Galileo vs. the Vatican: Looking Out, Above, and Beyond.”