Stationery exercise promotes write stuff

STUARTS DRAFT -- Stuarts Draft Postmaster Kevin Blackford is nostalgic about the days when people wrote letters to one another and thinks it's a shame that form of communication is less frequent.

So a few months ago, Blackford thought to give students at Stuarts Draft's Stump Elementary a stamped envelope so they could write letters to someone they knew.

It was the start of the pilot program "A Letter is Better!" that Blackford hopes will happen annually with local schools.

"E-mail has had a tremendous impact," said Blackford, whose reverence for writing letters was reinforced by reading a book about President Ronald Reagan's letters.

Everywhere, the evidence of the decline in letter-writing abounds, from the steady disappearance of blue Postal Service mailboxes, driven by lack of use, from their familiar places on city streets, to surveys showing that even among people 50 and older, less than half hand-write letters.

Still, students in fourth-grade teacher Donna Greenmun's class were taken with Blackford's idea.

Leah Stern penned a letter to her sister Abigail, a missionary in China.

"It was exciting," said Abigail, who visited her sister Friday at Stump Elementary. "I don't get many letters. She talked about what she liked at school."

Other students wrote letters to grandparents and other relatives.

Greenmun said the letter writing has accomplished much.

"This has been fun," said Greenmun, who said writing can be a chore for students.

With letter writing, she said the students are both writing and practicing their spelling -- important tasks as they prepare for more challenging content in school.

One of Greenmun's students, Garrett Campbell, wrote a follow-up letter to express his thoughts about writing letters.

"The reason I think that letters mean so much is because nowadays people don't write letters so often. We always text, e-mail, page and call," Garrett said.

He said letters are meaningful "because the writer took time out of their day to write that letter." Blackford's pilot program in Stuarts Draft will soon be written about in the Postmaster Gazette Magazine, a publication that goes to all U.S. postmasters.

On Friday, Blackford handed out more stamped envelopes to students in Greenmun's class.

He said the program's success to date has been helped by sponsorship from the Stuarts Draft Ruritan Club and the support of Augusta County Schools Superintendent Gary McQuain.

Bob Stuart writes for The News Virginian in Waynesboro.