This year’s participants in Poetry Out Loud included (l-r) Melissa Watson, John Tomidy (faculty advisor), Haley Howard, Emily Bowman, Brittany Merrell, and Christine Burke. Absent from picture: Chad Bobzin.The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Poetry Foundation have joined together to create Poetry Out Loud, a program that encourages the nation’s youth to learn about great poetry through memorization and recitation.
Participation in the program has grown at Byron-Bergen as well. For each of the last five years, over two hundred high school students were involved in the program, twenty of whom were selected from classroom performances to compete in the school level memorization/recitation competition held on January 11. Byron-Bergen freshmen Chad Bobzin, Emily Bowman, and Melissa Watson, sophomores Brittany Merrell and Christine Burke, and senior Haley Howard scored highest in the contest. The next step in Poetry Out Loud will be the Western Regional competition which will be held at Amherst High School on February 16. The State level competition will be held on March 24 in Albany, and the final National Competition is scheduled for May 13-15, in Washington, D.C.
