PVHS teacher selected as Summer Scholar

A Pleasant Valley High School teacher has received special recognition and an opportunity to attend an institute at a historic Sleepy Hollow plantation from the National Endowment for the Humanities this summer.

English teacher Michele Connors was selected by the Endowment for the federal agency’s Summer Scholar program, which invites teachers from across the country to engage in programs at various colleges, universities and cultural institutions.

This summer’s session will include 20 seminars and institutes, with topics such as “Abolitionism and the Underground Railroad,” “Reimagining Jane Eyre and Great Expectations: Teaching Literature through Adaptation” and “Teaching the Holocaust through Visual Culture.”

Connors will be attending the “Slavery in the Colonial North” program this summer at Philipsburg Manor, a milling and trading complex in New York that was home to 23 enslaved people of African descent in the