NYC STUDENT WRITING CONTEST OFFERS CASH PRIZE TO ENCOURAGE READING

In response to plummeting reading levels in New York City, Central Park Tutors has announced the Golden Pen Essay Contest to return reading books to the agenda.

NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES, October 14, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ -- In response to plummeting reading levels across New York City, well-known NYC tutoring film Central Park Tutors has announced the first-ever Golden Pen Essay Contest to help return reading books back to the middle and high school agenda.

The contest has free entry for all NYC Middle and High School students and the winner will be awarded $200 in cash plus the “Golden Pen.” Central Park Tutors founder Mike Wallach sees “the Golden Pen as a modern day Excalibur. They say the pen is mightier than the sword, but is it mightier than tablets and tiktok?”

The contest simply asks NYC students to submit a two-page essay telling the story of if and how a book has moved them and changed them for the better. The question is, are there any students still left out there who have even read a full-length book? National numbers show that reading has dropped precipitously: 27% of young teens said they read for fun daily in 2012, today that number is down to 14%.

“Kids these days are bombarded with instant gratification through scrolling-based websites, bite-sized videos and algorithms that entrance them likes mythical Sirens towards digital shores where their minds are almost entirely captured, often by people who have no greater ambition for them than selling them something or simply seeing their own online numbers go up,” says Wallach.

“Someone has to dive into this muck and plant a flag and say enough is enough. We know that reading great books changes our lives for the better; it helps young people learn how to think deeply about life itself, and it opens our hearts and minds to the most profound level of other people’s experience that can span generations and cross continents. We want to do what we can to bring that back, and we know our students will be better for it.”

Wallach himself is both a teacher and writer, having penned Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson’s film “The Bay” while running Central Park Tutors.

“It’s a vicious circle: the more students are entranced by technology, the less they have an attention for reading, and the less reading they do, the more they turn to technology. We want to try to turn that around. Maybe the $200 cash prize or the potential prestige of winning a writing contest will help push them to do that, and then the cycle can go the other way - kids fall in love with reading, and the more they read the more they develop the attention span to read more frequently.”

Central Park Tutors, the firm Wallach runs with his wife Susana, a dyslexia specialist, has been tutoring NYC students for over seventeen years, and has worked with over a thousand students from NYC’s most selective private schools.

The contest details and submission information can be found here:
https://centralparktutors.com/the-golden-pen-high-school-short-essay-contest/

Michael Wallach
Central Park Tutors
tutors@centralparktutors.com

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