TURNERS FALLS — Positive influence in a school community can come from anyone — students, teachers, cafeteria staff or someone who is just visiting for the day.
That’s the idea of the Earl McGraw Uplift Award, which is given once a semester at Turner Falls High School to one student and one staff member. This January, the award was given to sophomore Dylan Burnett and teacher Faith Klumb.
The award commemorates Earl McGraw, the former vice principal of Turners Falls High School, who died in 2016. At the school, McGraw is remembered for leading by supporting others, and for envisioning the school community as including everyone, regardless of their role or level of involvement, Klumb said.
“(The award) recognizes attributes of our community and people in our community that we don’t always focus on,” said Klumb, who has been teaching at Turners Falls High School for 15 years. “We focus on academics, we focus on athletic accomplishments, we focus on people that get high scores on certain tests. But this is an opportunity to recognize the other side of who we are.”
Recipients of the Uplift Award can be nominated by any member of the school community. Nominations are reviewed by a panel of staff members, then the winners are announced in a school assembly, according to Megan Bendiksen, a teacher on the review panel.
Burnett, this semester’s student recipient, is the 10th grade class vice president and captain of the junior varsity basketball team. She lives in Erving and went to Erving Elementary School before Turners Falls High School.
In Student Council, Burnett helps organize school events and attends conferences on leadership skills with other student councils. She first became involved last year, as a freshman.
“I wanted to step up and help make decisions and be a voice for my class,” she said.
As junior varsity basketball captain, Burnett mediates between the coach and the team. Unlike the coach, the captain is a social peer of her teammates, and may be able to influence them when the coach can’t, Burnett explained.
“There were some points where we just weren’t playing like ourselves,” Burnett said. “So I really had to talk to everyone, make sure everything was OK, and bring them up and tell them to play as hard as we can and work together. That was a big thing.”
Klumb, this semester’s staff recipient, has been teaching for 20 years, and has been at Turners Falls High School since 2005. She lives in New Hampshire.
She also teaches an academic support class, aimed at helping students graduate and transition to life after high school, and a class called “Rise Up,” that she describes as the only self-actualization class among all the local high schools.
“Rise Up,” before Klumb took it over in 2009, had been a drop-out prevention and drug education program. She rebuilt it to focus on leadership, community service and personal identity.
“We look at who we are as people, where we want to go in our future and how to get there,” she said.
Typical class projects involve identifying needs in the local community, and then designing and executing relevant social service projects. The class is designed to be diverse in terms of grade level, academic profiles and social backgrounds; the thinking here is to teach students how to work with and among a diverse set of skills, and to recognize their own roles in a group as well as the value of others’ roles, Klumb said.
The nominations for the Uplift Award are anonymous, so Klumb doesn’t know who nominated her, or what exactly the reason was. But she guessed that the classes she teaches — which focus on transitioning students into the next phase of their lives, regardless of where they are as high schoolers — may reflect something of the influence that Earl McGraw had on Turners Fall High School.
“He didn’t care about where you were, he didn’t care about who you were and where you came from,” she said. “All he cared about was where you were going. We are a school that is looking to where you are going.”
Reach Max Marcus at mmarcus@recorder.com or 413-930-4231.