The long connection between Shaker students and literary ability shows no signs of breaking off any time soon. This year’s awards are ample proof.
By Scott Stephens
Isabel Siegel. Photo by Gus Chan
It didn’t take Annie Siegel long to discover that there was something special about her daughter, Isabel. From the moment she learned to read at 6, the little girl was obsessively writing, developing her vivid imagination, and then capturing those flights of fantasy in words.
“On her first day of kindergarten, I brought her teacher a stack of notebooks that Isabel had filled up,” Annie recalls. “That’s why we bought her a laptop. The notebooks were piling up everywhere.”
These days, Annie and her husband, Scott, are rarely surprised what their daughter, now an eighth-grader at Shaker Heights Middle School, can accomplish when she puts pen to paper. This year – her first year in Power of the Pen, a writing club for Ohio seventh- and eighth-graders – Isabel took first place in all three rounds of the state competition and earned three first place titles at the regional level, an accomplishment unprecedented in Power of the Pen competition.
“The Power of the Pen had a tour de force season in 2021, with numerous students capturing honors at district, regional, and state levels..”
The Shaker Heights City School District is a charter member of the 35-yearold club, where students compete in a series of district, regional, and state competitions by writing short creative stories using provided prompts. Despite the pandemic eliminating in-person competition, the Shaker Heights Power of the Pen team had a tour de force season in 2021, with numerous students capturing honors at district, regional, and state levels. In addition to Isabel’s success, Ingrid Holda, now a ninth-grader, took 11th place overall at the state level out of 237 state-level writers, and won a Director’s Choice award for her story “Watch Me Fly.”
“There must be something in the water in Shaker,” says Erika Pfeiffer, co-advisor of the Shaker team for 14 years. “There’s a lot of talent here. These students root for each other. It really is a team.”
Co-advisor Sara Lambert agrees. She and Pfeiffer, both language arts teachers at the Middle School, have coached Power of the Pen together for seven years.
“You read the stories and it’s jaw dropping,” Lambert says. “There is a lot of raw talent. Sometimes they need someone to give them a little prompt to write. We try to push them out of their comfort zone a little bit.”
Writing Prowess in the District and Beyond
Isabel and her Power of the Pen teammates are the latest and most visible examples of the success Shaker Heights students have enjoyed with the written word. In 2016, two Shaker Heights High School graduates – Wesley Lowery, as a reporter at the Washington Post, and Kathryn Schulz, as a staff writer for the New Yorker – were awarded Pulitzer Prizes. Shaker students regularly excel in statewide and essay and playwriting competitions. The student newspaper, the Shakerite, routinely collects national honors for excellence in journalism. The student literary magazine, Semanteme, has been the springboard for the careers of several professional writers.
This writing prowess is not confined to the public school district. Students in area private and religious schools, such as University School, Laurel School, St. Dominic, and Mandel Jewish Day School, regularly share the winner’s circle in competitions with their public school peers. While the popular media likes to define young people by video games and TikTok, the traditional written word is clearly alive and well among young people in Shaker Heights.
Thomas Smyers, winner of the Maltz Museum’s Stop the Hate writing contest
“I don’t worry a lot about the demise of the written word. Reports of its death are always greatly exaggerated,” says critically acclaimed author Celeste Ng, a 1998 Shaker Heights High School graduate and author of the bestselling novel Little Fires Everywhere. “I was lucky enough to have many opportunities to write at Shaker, from a teacher encouraging me to write poems way back at Woodbury, to working on Semanteme, to the playwriting class I took at the High School.
“But more important than any particular class or club was the general message that writing was a worthwhile pursuit, and that it was something that was within my reach,” Ng adds. “Young people, like everyone else, respond to writing that resonates with them, whether it speaks to the particulars of their lives, issues they care about, or larger questions of the human condition.”
Those larger questions are what caught the attention of Thomas Smyers, who graduated from Shaker Heights High School in June and is now a freshman at Harvard University. Last spring, Thomas was awarded a four-year, $20,000 scholarship as the grand prize winner in the 2021 “Stop the Hate” contest, an initiative of the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage.
Additionally, Thomas’ high school will receive a $5,000 anti-bias education grant. Thomas says the premium Shaker Heights Schools placed on the written word encouraged him to enter the contest.
“I think that’s really prevalent in Shaker,” he said. “They really pushed us to enter the Maltz competition.”
The contest celebrates Northeast Ohio students committed to creating a more accepting, inclusive society by standing up and speaking out against bias and bigotry. Thomas focused his essay on his late grandfather, Steven Minter, a Shaker resident and trailblazing African American leader in government and philanthropy, who marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge for voting rights in Selma, Alabama 56 years ago.
Thomas and his grandfather had planned to retrace those steps. But Minter, the former president of the Cleveland Foundation, died unexpectedly in 2019, before he and Thomas could make the trip. Thomas said he put his admiration, and his regret, into words.
“I like to think that even without retracing my grandpa’s steps on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, I am walking in his footsteps and helping to bend the arc of this nation toward a more equitable and just future,” Thomas wrote. “My grandpa would be proud of me, but he would want me to keep going. Won’t you join me on the journey?”
Strengthening Academic Achievement
It’s no wonder that Shaker and Power of the Pen have been a good fit. The writing competition made its debut at Nordonia Junior High School in 1986 with 170 students from 15 neighboring school districts. That first tournament helped earn recognition for the program’s founder, Nordonia teacher Lorraine B. Merrill, who in 1988 was named a Christa McAuliffe Fellow by the U.S. and Ohio departments of education.
Members of the Shaker Heights Power of the Pen team. Seated, left to right, Isabel Siegel, 8th grade, Asher Voorhees, 9th, Zoe Stiefel, 9th, Anjum Reddy, 9th, Ingrid Holda, 9th, Alexa Carpenter, 8th. Standing, left to right, Erika Pfeiffer, co-advisor, Ezra Ellenbogen, 9th, Neko Tien, 8th, Daniel Carroll, 8th, Sara Lambert, co-advisor.
The honor resulted in a one-year sabbatical which enabled Merrill to create a state Power of the Pen program. Her work drew additional funding support from the Gund, Knight, and Cleveland foundations. In 1990, Power of the Pen hosted its fi rst state tournament at Denison University. In 2001, an expanded state tournament found a home at the College of Wooster.
Now one of Ohio’s largest educational enhancement programs, Power of the Pen embodies Merrill’s vision of a program that blends innovative teacher training with interscholastic writing competitions as a means of strengthening academic achievement among middle school students. The program fi ts neatly into the Shaker Schools’ International Baccalaureate learning framework, which emphasizes critical thinking and teamwork.
“I think writing has always been a strength at Shaker,” Lambert says. “It’s always been a strong suit of our district.”
Writing can be a solitary pursuit, which may explain why members of Shaker’s Power of the Pen team were largely unperturbed by the isolation of the pandemic. Isabel does much of her writing at her family’s quiet dining room table, where a large poster depicting the cover of the Harper Lee classic
To Kill a Mockingbird looms just outside the room. Light shines through the windows of her bedroom, illuminating piles of books and the beanbag chair she sometimes sits in when she invents her stories. In addition to her parents, Isabel shares the house with her brother Miles, a fi fth-grader, and the family’s goldendoodle, Chase. Like many young writers, Isabel’s fi rst interest was fantasy. She devoured the Harry Potter novels, reading the J.K. Rowling series three times. Although she has been writing for more than half of her 13 years, Isabel said the competitive element of Power of the Pen – 40 minutes to write a story from a random prompt – has helped her focus and expand her writing.
“My grandpa would be proud of me, but he would want me to keep going. Won’t you join me on the journey?”
“It was way different from what I was used to,” she says. “In competition you have 40 minutes to write a short story. I think it helped me learn story writing and structure. This year, hopefully, we’ll do it in person.”
Last June, Isabel celebrated her bat mitzvah with Rabbi Eddie Sukol from The Shul in Pepper Pike. To mark the occasion, she published her own book of short stories, Stepping Stones. Original art drawn by her best friend, Sophie Steinweg, graces the cover. Proceeds from donations for the book went to the Actors Fund, a charitable organization that supports Broadway performers who were hard hit during the pandemic. The project melded two of Isabel’s greatest loves: writing and musical theater.
For now, Isabel is looking forward to eighth grade and her second year in Power of the Pen. She’s also setting her sights on writing a novel. In the forward to Stepping Stones, Annie Siegel says she is confident that her daughter can achieve anything she sets her mind to.
“I can’t wait to see what your next chapter has in store for you,” she told Isabel.
