Ray McManus teaches an advanced fiction writing class as part of Richland Northeast High School's Palmetto Center for the Arts Literary Program. Ray McManus knows about how poetry can change your life. It changed his. McManus, a teacher in Richland Northeast High School’s Palmetto Center for the Arts Literary Program, was a teenager on the verge of dropping out of high school when a school librarian gave him a poetry book to read during detention. “I was not the type of kid who would be reading poetry,” he said. “But I opened it up and fell in love with the language. The writer was saying things that meant something, using a language that was charged and powerful and saying what I wanted to say.”

Now as a teacher and associate director of the USC’s Split P Soup poetry workshop, McManus strives to bring that same sense of tranforming “magical moments” to his PCA students.

“What I found in poetry is a conduit,” McManus said. “A lot of times when you’re writing poetry you’re looking around and seeing relationships that you might not otherwise see. These are relationships that most people might never put together. That’s the whole magic of metaphor — a wonderful learning apparatus. We’re able to compare things we know to things that we don’t know but can learn through those comparisons. It becomes a natural education process. They start making those connections in math class, in science. We get students to become more actively engaged in that thought process.”

The Palmetto Center for the Arts Literary Program includes courses in poetry and fiction writing, with a course in playwriting to be added in the 2005–06 school year. Writing students also take part in the Split P Soup workshop, held at Richland Northeast. As District Two’s only high-school arts conservatory, PCA also includes programs for theatre, dance, vocal and instrumental music, and the fine arts.

Richland Northeast is also home to two other District Two magnet programs: the Horizon interdisciplinary program for highly motivated academically talented students and the InfoLINK technology–based program. The school will hold open houses for all three magnets on Thursday, January 13, and Tuesday, January 18, at 6:30 pm in the atrium of the school’s new science building at 7500 Brookfield Road. Faculty and students will be on hand to talk to rising ninth graders and their parents. The evening will begin with a performance by PB&J, RNE’s newest vocal group, and the Northeast Current, the state’s only electric–string ensemble. In addition, students and parents can learn more about RNE’s two new school–within–a–school programs —Convergence Media and The Center for Science.

For further information, call Lori Marrero, RNE assistant principal, at 699-2800 ext. 2811. -30-