THE SCHOOL YEAR is ending, and all across the nation -- around the world, for that matter -- the Flat Stanley children are coming home to report on their adventures.
Jeff Brown couldn't be happier, and neither could a few hundred primary school teachers and thousands of kids between the ages of 4 and 8 from the Azores to Zimbabwe, not to mention the Grace and St. Peter's School in Baltimore.
Brown is the author of the delightful 1964 children's book, Flat Stanley, about a little boy named Stanley Lambchop who is squashed by a falling bulletin board, leaving him depth-disadvantaged.
But this handicap does not deter Stanley. He finds that he can slide under locked doors and retrieve his mother's ring when she drops it through a sidewalk grate. A California vacation is a snap: Stanley's parents simply fold him in an envelope and dispatch him in the mail, saving the airfare.
It was this last adventure in squashedness that prompted the Flat Stanley project that has spread across the world. Here's how it works:
In the fall, after they read Flat Stanley, kids make life-size cutouts of themselves, color them, fold them and send them by mail to a friend or relative afar. They and their teachers write cover letters asking recipients to treat them to an adventure, send a postcard back and then dispatch them to someone else. The last recipient in May sends the flat children back home.
"It's a great exercise in geography," Stephanie Turnbach said one day last week as she and a dozen of her first-graders at Grace and St. Peter's described their year of living flattitudinously. "It's also good for writing and storytelling."
The friends and relatives who played host to the flat children were quite enterprising. Some sent back souvenirs, photos and sandwiches. Even flat people have to eat.
The grandmother of Flat Kori Brierley-Bowers wrote a short story about Kori's flight with a seagull on the Maine coast. Flat Charlie Kreizenbeck, the first to leave the country, went to a pig roast in South Carolina and a play in London's West End. Flat Amelia Anderson rode a camel in the Sahara. Flat Gabriel McCarthy made 10 stops; he went sledding in Rhode Island and swimming in Florida.
Flat William Wisner-Carlson got the signature of actor Tom Hanks in California, and there's a photo of Flat William sprawled across a monument at the intersection of New Mexico, Texas and Mexico. "I was in two states and a country at the same time," said William.
One of the things the Flat Stanley project demonstrated, said Turnbach, is that there's a fine line between the real and the imagined among 5- and 6-year-olds.
Even though her children never strayed far from Grace and St. Peter's Mount Vernon neighborhood, she said, "some of them think they actually took the trip and always speak about it in the first person. I started to think that way, too."
No teachers' pet
If state schools Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick runs for lieutenant governor with Republican Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., it will make for a nasty campaign pitting Ehrlich/Grasmick against the 56,000-member Maryland State Teachers Association.
The MSTA has endorsed Ehrlich's opponent, Democrat Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, and the relationship between Grasmick and the union has turned in recent months from cordial to frosty. Grasmick quietly opposed the union's main order of business in the 2002 General Assembly, a law allowing MSTA locals to bargain on discipline policies and other matters not normally open to teacher-school board negotiations.
Grasmick disagreed with her own board on the bill, which was endorsed by Gov. Parris N. Glendening and opposed by the Maryland Association of Boards of Education.
Grasmick is a lifelong Democrat, but she's not afraid to take independent or conservative positions -- or to opine that teachers need to do a better job. Across the country, for example, conservatives are fighting union efforts to broaden teachers' collective bargaining rights.
If Grasmick enters the race, the recently discarded Maryland School Performance Assessment Program, with which the superintendent is closely associated, could become a hot issue.
"MSPAP isn't likely to be debated as a single issue," MSTA President Patricia Foerster said, "but rather as part of a larger discussion over the proper relationship between the state, the superintendent and local schools." Translation: Get out of our business.
Name change
William E. "Brit" Kirwan may be leaving the presidency of Ohio State University to become chancellor of the University System of Maryland, but his name will be left behind.
To honor Kirwan's commitment to diversity, Ohio State changed the name last week of a major research office to the William E. Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.