The Atlanta Hawks recently hosted a pep rally to recognize Heritage Academy as the top-performing elementary school in Atlanta Public School’s March “Race2Read” Challenge, held in celebration of National Reading Month.
During the celebration held at Heritage Academy’s gym, the top three classrooms and top three individual readers were awarded and the school received a stipend for its media center to enhance literacy resources.
Principal Trennis Harvey shared thoughts on the honor given to Heritage Academy Elementary School
“Motivating our students to read is one of our biggest things we push from day one of school,” Harvey said. “It motivates them to just grab a book. Reading is a fundamental skill that all of our students have to have in order to be functional in society. And so reading is not just about reading classes. Math involves reading, science involves reading, social studies involves reading, everything involves reading. So it’s the baseline for anything that our students are going to do. So that’s the real big push. Our teachers got our parents involved in the initiative, and that’s what pushed it as well.”
Portia Benbow, director of community impact for Atlanta Hawks, shared her thoughts on the collaboration.
“Whenever you can have a Hawks pep rally, kids get excited,” Benbow said. “They want to read. They want to win. And so that was our role in this. And so we are honored and excited to be here to celebrate Heritage Academy for their first place win. You could actually tell that they really were excited to win, and that they really put their all into the reading competition. And so honestly, it just makes us really feel like we actually do have an impact on their reading, and that’s what we want at the end of the day.”
