Full-time students in grades 10, 11 or 12 at an accredited school in Johnson County are eligible to enter the Banned Books Essay contest for the 2004-05 school year.
The Johnson County First Amendment Foundation is sponsoring the contest, and will award each student author of a winning essay $1,000. The foundation will select two essays in each of the three grade levels, giving out a total of $6,000.
Students entering the contest will read and defend one of the five following books, taken from a list of more than 90 books that have been challenged, restricted, removed or banned (as reported in the Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom): Catch-22 by Joseph Heller; A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines; Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo; The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood; and The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks. A summary of each of the selected books is attached.
Registration materials have been mailed to Johnson County's secondary schools. Each student must have a faculty sponsor. Faculty sponsors must be full-time classroom teachers, counselors or librarians from the same high school as the student submitting the essay. Each faculty member may sponsor a maximum of 10 entries.
This year, in addition to the essay contest, the Foundation also will be offering grants of up to $500 each to teachers interested in developing and implementing a program in his or her classroom or school designed to increase student awareness and knowledge of the First Amendment. To apply for this grant, an interested teacher should submit to the foundation a written outline of the proposal and a summary of the proposal's estimated costs. Submitted proposals will be evaluated by the foundation and grants awarded before the end of the 2004-2005 school year.
The Johnson County First Amendment Foundation was established to promote a better understanding among Kansas students, particularly students in Johnson County, of First Amendment and other important Constitutional rights that protect the members of a free society's freedom to write, freedom to publish, and freedom to read.
The Advisory Committee for the Johnson County First Amendment Foundation consists of Richard Luckert, Lorretta Wood, Jeff Johns, and Steve Bledsoe – a teacher, a librarian, a member of the Johnson County Bar Association and a representative of the American Civil Liberties Union, respectively. The Advisory Committee will make recommendations each year for the use of the income from the fund.
— Davina Jamison/The Star
