It’s been hard being a kid growing up during a pandemic, due to the enforced isolation and disconnection from one’s peers. Fortunately, New Paltz teacher Melissa Feldmann was working on a solution. Drawing upon a program Feldmann experienced growing up, the elementary teacher is putting in place an in-school postal system. Students — and teachers and administrators — will be able to write letters to one another, maintaining social connections even among people no longer sharing the same classroom. Those letters will be sorted and delivered by some of the same children who will be learning a particular set of communication skills that can feel forgotten in an age of text messages and tweets.
The system that Feldmann is creating was inspired by a program called “Wee Deliver” that Feldmann was exposed to in the 1990s. It was initially a project promoted through the United States Postal Service, but it appears that “Wee Deliver” has been abandoned. Nevertheless, it remains in effect at Feldmann’s elementary school, and when the teacher was asked to design an instructional program as part of a professional development class, an in-school postal system immediately came to mind. With the USPS not being in the picture, Feldmann secured funding through the school district’s Foundation for Student Enhancement. Getting through that process during a pandemic was an especially lengthy process; the third-graders Feldmann first surveyed about their interest in this idea might see it put into place in the coming months as fifth graders.
Internal mail delivery could start as soon as January at Lenape Elementary and this project is being launched at a time when the social and emotional health of children is being considered more seriously than ever before. Particularly after experiencing the isolation of having to learn from home rather than alongside friends, the ability to connect with one another through the written word hearkens back to the days of long-distance relationships that were almost entirely forged and strengthened by the power of the words on a page.
What’s involved is creating a facsimile of the national postal system, inside of a school. Addresses were created by naming each hallway as if it were a street, and real-life street signs will show which one is which. Each classroom needs a mailbox, as well as a mail bag; one student is picked to sort the letters, and another walks the halls to deliver them twice a week. That’s why Feldmann sought the foundation grant, to pay for the equipment necessary to make this work.
Students are excited. Feldmann got input from them when readying to apply for funding. “What I would like most is that we can still talk to friends and teachers in other classes,” wrote one child. Feldmann has heard this desire voiced in many different ways, by students and their guardians alike. Kids miss friends who are in different classes, and they miss favorite teachers. Letters have long been how humans maintain relationships when they cannot talk in person. This year’s students have been working hard to get the program off the ground. They are the ones who counted all the classrooms in the building to help calculate the materials that will be needed. They are also the ones learning about how to track those expenses and keep within a budget.
What the adults find valuable are the learning opportunities presented by having mail delivered throughout the school. Teachers can assign the writing of different kinds of letters, for one, helping students master different ways to express ideas. The assigned helper roles provide opportunities for responsibility, and presumably may also be used as a reward if the interest in performing them remains high. Feldmann is invested in keeping the interest high among children and adults alike. That’s why there’s now a committee dedicated to ensuring that the money invested in getting this off the ground will be able to return these benefits for years to come, just like how it’s still running in Feldmann’s childhood school. Given that there’s an “internal, intrinsic motivation” to write letters in order to keep in touch with friends, it may not be difficult to keep it going for years to come.
It could be that writing letters will only be appealing to children who haven’t been cursed with phones of their own just yet, but Feldmann believes it’s possible that interest in being able to send letters from one building to another may emerge as current students move to the middle school, or tell younger siblings how it all works. It might even be possible one day to send fan mail to Superintendent Angela Urbina-Medina. Whether the superintendent chooses to write back is a question that can only be answered once that first letter is received.
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