Speaker Urges Grant Students To Strive For Excellence
As the Rev. Percy “Happy” Watkins waited for his turn to speak, he sat on a child-size bench in the gym at Grant Elementary. The brief time on the bench gave him a chance to look at the faces of hundreds of children, who also were straining to get a look at him.
Watkins visited Grant last Thursday to recite a speech made famous by another black man nearly 35 years ago.
Watkins’ appearance was part of the school’s celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and an all-school program dedicated to the importance of reading.
He stepped to the makeshift podium and introduced himself to the children.
“My name is Happy,” he said, thumping his chest. “Happy.”
The children squealed at the revelation that a grown man’s name is “Happy.”
And while Watkins did recite the famous King “I Have a Dream” speech, he also asked his young listeners to follow in King’s footsteps and be the very best they could be.
“If you can’t be a tall pine on the top of the hill, be a little shrub in the valley, but be the very best shrub in the valley,” he said, his voice booming across the gym.
Watkins’ four children, now grown, attended Grant.
“This is like coming back home for me,” he said.
Watkins came to Spokane from New York City when he was 19 and lived around the corner from Grant and across the street from a girl named Sally Rainey. She is now the school’s reading specialist.
Watkins turned to Rainey and told students that the woman whose father was a cook and who now stood before them, an educator, had set goals in her life, something they could do for themselves as well.
Rainey and other teachers, including Jerry Numbers, one of Watkins’ longtime friends, invited him to talk to students about King, a man who helped changed America in his pursuit of civil rights.
“If Dr. King were here today, if he could come to Grant, he would look out and see all the different faces, all the uniqueness, all the talent,” Watkins said.
“Do you know that Dr. King’s best friends were his schoolbooks? So I want you to give up some of that Mickey Mouse and Woody Woodpecker and you know what else on TV and maybe go to the library and pick up some books to read.”
“How many of you are going to do that?” he asked.
Hundreds of hands shot into the air.
Blair student tops math competition
Jacob LaForce, a sixth-grader at Blair Elementary School, won first place in the sixth-grade individual “Math is Cool” competition at Lewis and Clark High School.
The Jan. 9 event was organized by LC math teacher Greg Sampson and the LC math team.
More than 180 sixth-grade students from Pullman to the Canadian border competed in the event.
LaForce, a student at Blair, attends eighth-grade algebra classes at Medical Lake Middle School in the morning and then returns to Blair, where he finishes his day.
Glenda Kohls, a teacher at Blair, coached LaForce, who had to demonstrate his ability to do calculations off the top of his head in a competition called “mental math.”
“We weren’t allowed to use calculators, but we were allowed to use scratch paper,” LaForce said.
Laforce is the son of George and Tammie LaForce, who live at Fairchild Air Force Base.
Ian Kingery, also a student at Blair, placed 13th in the competition.
Lewis and Clark will host the fourth-grade “Math is Cool” competition on Feb. 7.
District honors LC teacher
The Spokane School District 81 school board named Glenn Williams, an English teacher at Lewis and Clark High School, as one of two Distinguished Teachers for the second quarter of the 1996-97 school year.
The other teacher named was Suzanne Vingelen, a first-grade teacher at Stevens Elementary School.
Williams thanked his mentor, Sally Pfeifer, head of the LC English Department, for helping “mold a 23-year-old teacher.” Williams has been teaching at LC eight years.
One of Williams’ students said, “He made you learn before you even knew it.”
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