It was May of 1996 when seventh graders Crystal Edwards and Taneisha McClendon from PS/IS41s KWN Team, along with chaperones Inez Barron and myself, were invited to Panasonic’s 1996 KWN Awards Ceremony in Atlanta, Georgia to accept honors for our school’s winning KWN video submission “Bullets Through My Window” - an anti-gun video that had won the categories for “Best Editing” and “Best Sound.” (BTW, these were the first of about seven or eight other awards that the video went on to win in both national and international competitions.) Panasonic paid all expenses for our five-day trip that began on Saturday, May 18th and ended on Wednesday, May 22nd, 1996. Panasonic chose Atlanta to host the KWN ceremony that year (the first time the ceremony was ever held outside the NYC area) because Atlanta was also the host city for The 1996 Summer Olympic Games, for which Panasonic was a huge corporate sponsor. And through that sponsorship Panasonic was able to arrange for us KWN winners a bus tour of Atlanta’s Olympic facilities - most of which were still under construction at the time but were still interesting to see. During our five-day stay in Atlanta Panasonic also arranged other places for us to visit including the Martin Luther King Center, The World of Coca-Cola (an exhibit about the soda company), an interactive science museum called SciTrek, and a Panasonic factory that specialized in car entertainment such as radios and CD players. The Kid Witness News Awards ceremony was held at Atlanta’s restored Fox Theater that was formerly a prestigious movie palace that was originally built in the nineteen-twenties. The last hour of this video includes a lot of that awards ceremony as a Panasonic crew videotaped and distributed copies of it to all the KWN winning schools. https://youtube/watch?v=H2pvfPCC4t0&index=106&list=PL90CE1FA2BB1B416F
Posted on: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 19:26:53 +0000