Reading reward: blue-haired principal

March 8, 2008 at 2:52a.m.

High school baseball players reading to the children provided great role models, one teacher said.

AUSTINTOWN — The excitement level grew the minute Woodside Elementary Principal Michael Woods stepped in front of his kindergarten through grade 3 pupils holding a bottle of blue paint.

Their excitement was off the charts as Woods and a mom removed a sheet of paper from the multipurpose room wall, revealing the number of books the children had read for the week: 2,209, well above their goal of 1,000.

“There’s an important lesson in this. A promise is a promise,” Woods said. “I promised all of you that Mr. Hair, I mean Mr. Woods, promised to turn his hair blue,” said the school principal, apparently a little excited and nervous about the performance he was about to give.

“Do you want Mr. Woods to look like this?” he asked, pointing to a drawing on the wall of a man with spikey blue hair.

For the next couple of minutes, about 300 children gave their answer in unison: “Do it,” they chanted.

Woods promised the pupils he would modify his hair Friday if they reached their book-reading goal during the National Education Association’s Read Across America celebration this week.

The school was one of only a couple in Ohio and one of just 18 cities in 10 states selected to have events all week long, a cash donation of $1,000 for library books, a visit from a 7-foot Cat in the Hat from the Dr.Seuss storybook, and other activities.

As the children watched and laughed, their principal sat in a chair and received his spiky new hairdo from Shannon Anderson, president of Woodside’s parent Teacher Association.

Afterward, Woods danced around the gym and gave the children a good performance as a reward.

“I thought it was really funny, and it was fun to see him with his hair dyed blue,” Grace Offerdahl, 9, a third-grader, said afterward.

“It was really cool we could read over 2,000 books,” she said. Grace read about 20 of them herself, she said.

The assembly Friday morning ended an eventful week for the school, said Teresa Lord, a reading teacher at Woodside.

The children not only participated in events that celebrated the 104th birthday of children’s author Dr. Seuss, but they received visits throughout the week from Austintown Fitch High School students, who came to read to the children.

Among the groups was the high school baseball team.

“It’s good to have that role model. They look up to that,” Lord said. Having the young boys see their heroes reading can make a strong impression, she said.

Lord added that the NEA representatives told her the children at Woodside seemed to be the best prepared of the students they visited so far. When the NEA representatives read certain parts of Dr. Seuss books, the childen were able to recite the ending of many of the lines from the book.

Lord said she thinks the week achieved its goal of instilling in the children a love of reading.

runyan@vindy.com