Bayless Intermediate Students Bridge Divides with West County Pen Pals

Though they are less than an hour’s drive apart, there are some big differences between students at and their peers at .

Twice a month, however, Tiffany Markus’s fourth-grade class reaches across cultural and economic divides through the lost art of letter writing. The 21 students—many of who were born in Bosnia, Vietnam or Iraq—share their lives with pen pals in Jennifer Stub’s largely white and affluent fifth-grade class at Chesterfield Elementary.

“It’s definitely a different world, but I think it is good for our kids to see the other side of things,” Markus said.

Markus, who last Thursday was honored at the Affton Chamber of Commerce Exceptional Educators Awards Banquet, has taught at Bayless Intermediate for six years. In her first years she befriended Strub, who was then a teacher at Bayless Intermediate.

Four years ago, Strub moved to Chesterfield Elementary. Seeing how different things could be in West County, last year she had the idea having the two classes connect.

“The kids in here are just like, ‘Oh, you’re from here, you’re from here.’ The kids in Chesterfield don’t have the same experience of diversity,” Markus said. Fourteen out of her 21 students were born outside of America. “(Strub) wanted her kids to see that.”

Markus actually lives in Chesterfield, which makes organizing the letter exchange simple. Strub just drops the letters off at Markus’s house in Chesterfield.

The pen pal project began in September, when the Bayless and Chesterfield students paired up without having met, with some students in the smaller Bayless class taking on two pen pals. They wrote back and forth about their lives, uncensored and unrevised by their teachers, for several months before the two classes met for a shared service day at the St. Louis Area Food Bank on Feb.  24.

Markus said the students were nervous at first, but quickly warmed up and became friendly.

“To put a face with all the conversations—it’s more intimidating than it looks.  I was like, ‘You guys are not this shy,’” Markus said.

Ermin Lemes, from Markus’s class, got to meet both of his two Chesterfield pen pals.

“I had a lot of fun, to meet my pen pal,” Lemes said. “They were big.”

The two classes worked together to sort and categorize food and other items, processing more than 9,000 pounds of donations—enough to help about 7,000 people.

“At first I was hesitant, because we have several families who may visit the food bank. But the kids were so excited,” Markus said.

While they worked, the students got to know each other. There were some surprises, when Chesterfield students discovered they had mistaken the gender of some Bayless students with unusual names. In the end, Markus thought the classes really bonded.

“We talked about what their favorite color is,” said Irena Galijasev, who also has two pen pals from Strub’s class. “At the end, me and my two pen pals said it was the best time of my life.”

The two classes will meet again in May, when the Chesterfield students will visit Bayless using money they raised from pledges to their reading drive. Their teachers are currently planning to spend the day on team-building exercises and possibly a trip to the Dairy Queen down the road.

Markus said some of the students will likely continue to keep in touch with their pen pals after the end of school, probably through e-mail and Facebook. Meanwhile, Markus and Stub believe the project was successful enough to run again with their new set of students next year—this time perhaps with video-chat introduction over Skype, on the two classes’ Smart Boards.

“I think they’ve learned to be more responsible,” Markus said. “The Chesterfield kids are a little older, so they’ve learned some new words.”

Next year’s classes will be different in makeup and will likely have a different experience, but Markus hopes that the pen pal project will continue to bring together young people from across the county, across cultures and across socioeconomic strata.

“It’s kind of funny,” Markus said. “They don’t see the boundaries.”

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