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Mandeville, LA – For some, cursive writing might as well be a foreign language– about as readable, say, as the cuneiform found on ancient clay tablets from the lost kingdom of Sumeria.

How could something so easy to learn- and so useful- be slipping away?

Well, some blame society’s infatuation with texting on cell phones and typing on I-Pads.  Others, including many educators, blame the ever-growing emphasis in schools on test-taking (and test-prepping) for shoving cursive out of the classroom.

Whatever the reason, instruction in cursive has been quietly disappearing from school curriculums across the nation.  But Louisiana has joined about a dozen other states that have passed laws recently to bring it back.

State Senator Beth Mizell  drafted the Louisiana law, passed in 2016, that requires all schools to teach cursive. The law took affect this semester, starting in January for second-graders.

But at Cedarwood School in Mandeville, cursive never left.  It’s always been taught because the school’s founder and principal, Kathryn LeBlanc believes in it.

“Learning is scaffolding,” says LeBlanc. “We ‘scaffold’ skills, and students who master cursive at this (young) age will go on to college and be more efficient at taking notes.”  They might also be smarter than their peers.

Studies have shown that writing in cursive improves learning by forcing both hemispheres of the brain to work in tandem, while printing or typing does not.

Beyond the classroom, Sen. Mizell credits one of her constituents for suggesting that cursive is needed more than you might expect.  She says that a title company owner in Amite told her that he was having trouble finding high school students who could help him in his business during the summers.  Turns out, the high schoolers were not able to read important notations written in cursive on property documents.

Intrigued, Mizell proposed the bill to make cursive mandatory, and got some big-time support from the chairman of the senate education committee.  He  said that he had been taken aback to learn that his own teenage nephew had to call home for help from a grocery store once, because he couldn’t decipher a list of items– written in cursive.