Schools

Hoboken Charter School Healing Wall Receives National Character Education Award

The Hoboken Charter School Healing Wall was displayed in City Hall last year after Superstorm Sandy as a way for students to share their thoughts and prayers with those suffering in the aftermath of the storm.

The Hoboken Charter School has been recognized by a national character education organization for the Sandy-inspired Healing Wall its students and members of the community created following last year's devastating storm.

The school is one of 262 international recipients of the Character Education Partnership's 2013 Promising Practice award, which the organization presents to educators in schools across the world who have developed and implemented effective character education projects.

High school art teacher and service learning coordinator Mira Septimus and a number of her senior students worked in collaboration to develop the Healing Wall, which was intended as a way for students to share messages of hope, personal reflections and thoughts and prayers for those affected by Sandy.

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Five city schools ultimately contributed to the wall, whose more than 800 paper bricks were displayed in Hoboken City Hall within a month of the storm.

In addition to creating the wall, students also documented the stories of residents seriously affected by the storm and, through the Dodge Foundation, shared those residents' tales at a poetry workshop and poetry reading performance at the Hoboken Library. 

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"Creating the Healing Wall, collaborating with other schools and meeting with Mayor Zimmer and the Dodge Foundation, showed students not only the responsibility they had as global citizens but also the impact each one of them could make as individuals," Hoboken Charter School executive director Deirdra Grode said. "As Ms. Septimus said, 'A wall is made of individual’s bricks; together they form a community.'"

Septimus and the school will be honored in October at the 20th National Forum on Character Education in Washington, D.C.


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