Ken Burns and Gold Medal winner, Ethan

The Greenwood School (a middle and high school boarding school for boys with language based and attentional learning differences) in Putney, Vermont (www.greenwood.org) is proud to partner with award-winning director and producer Ken Burns to produce The Address—a Ken Burns feature length documentary focusing on Greenwood students’ challenges and triumphs in studying, memorizing, and publicly reciting The Gettysburg Address. An integrated study of The Gettysburg Address is a Greenwood tradition. Since the school’s founding in 1978, Greenwood students have memorized and recited The Address in front of their peers and families. It is a test of courage and resilience, and at Greenwood it is an inspirational rite of passage. Ken and his Florentine Films team have been “embedded” in the Greenwood community since Thanksgiving and have documented over 200 hours of Greenwood students’ trials and successes. On February 15, the students recited The Address to an audience numbering 250; it was a triumphant and magical celebration and a moving testament to our students’ perseverance, bravery, and dedication.

Ken Burns remarked: 

The boys were all magnificent; their individual struggles and courage were so evident as the great words of great men echoed throughout the evening, giving even more meaning to them than anyone could dare guess.

Headmaster Stewart Miller congratulating the students

Greenwood is in us now  and we hope in the not too distant future to be able to share with you a film that surprises, delights, moves and yet is utterly familiar to the families and the extraordinary staff who work to try to deliver these boys from their enslavement, who try to give them, each and every one of them, a new birth of freedom.

Ken’s goal is to release the feature length film in November to coincide with the 150th anniversary of President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

Founded in 1978, the Greenwood School is a boarding and day school for boys in grades 6 through 12.  For over thirty years Greenwood has empowered bright and talented boys who face dyslexia, related language-based learning differences, ADHD, and executive function deficits with the skills necessary to bridge the gap between their outstanding promise and present abilities. 

The Greenwood School has limited space and is now accepting applications for Fall 2013, grades 6th-12th. For more information, please contact us.

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The Address, parts of which he filmed Thursday at the Gettysburg National Military Park, is about a Vermont school for boys with learning disabilities who memorize and recite Abraham Lincoln’s iconic Gettysburg Address, which he gave 150 years ago this November.

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Burns said he plans to have the documentary, planned for between 90 minutes and two hours, ready for a sesquicentennial commemoration of the Gettysburg Address on Nov. 19, with a national TV broadcast tentatively planned for next spring, and a challenge for all Americans to learn or relearn it.

The recital of the Gettysburg Address is a central study feature at Greenwood School, a boarding school in southern Vermont for 50 bright and talented boys with learning disabilities, such as dyslexia or attention difficulties.

Burns has been a judge for a decade at the school’s annual address recitals. Film crews for The Address embedded with students on campus for three months as they prepared for the competition in February. On Thursday, Burns bused the entire school to the place where Lincoln famously began with “four score and seven years ago” and ended with tributes to men who gave “the last full measure of devotion.”

Read the rest: Ken Burns’ ‘measure of devotion’ for Gettysburg Address (USAToday, May 2, 2013)

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