A Teacher Steps into the Spotlight

Middle school teacher Freddie Hendricks received a Tony Award for his role changing lives through theater.

Teacher Freddie Hendricks (left) and actor/comedian Kenan Thompson attend an event for Tony Award nominees in May 2026. Thompson was once a student of Hendricks.

The Tony Awards are theater’s biggest night of the year. It’s the awards show that honors the best stage performers, directors, playwrights, costume designers, and anyone else who works to make live performances magical. This year, one of those magic-makers was middle school theater teacher Freddie Hendricks.

Hendricks has dedicated his life to helping middle school students learn leadership and creativity through performance. He teaches acting, movement, and storytelling at the Utopian Academy for the Arts in Ellenwood, Georgia. Some of his pupils have gone on to perform on the world’s biggest stages.

“I’ve always had a passion for theater. I’m an actor myself, and when I got into teaching years and years and years and years ago, it became my passion,” he said in an interview with the Associated Press.

Freddie Hendricks (left) accepts his award onstage at the Tony Awards on June 7, 2026.

While the Tony Awards mainly honor the current stars of Broadway, Hendricks accepted the Excellence in Theater Education Award on the Tony stage on June 7. This special award is given each year to a theater teacher who makes a positive impact on students through the art of performance.

Hendricks’ former students include Saturday Night Live icon Kenan Thompson and actress and singer Saycon Sengbloh. This year another former student, Justin Ellington, was also nominated for a Tony Award for his work in sound design in a Broadway show. Ellington did not win, but he still shared the glory of the night with the teacher who helped inspire his theater career.

Singer and Tony Awards host Pink (top) performs an aerial act along with actor and singer Neil Patrick Harris on stage at the awards.

Hendricks says his approach is simply to help young people embrace who they are and express it in a safe place.

“A lot of kids these days, they don’t love themselves,” he said. “They don’t know who they are, for one thing. And I just kind of start with that and then go with loving themselves for who they are and letting them know up front, ‘In here, this is a safe space. You’re loved in here. You’re accepted in here. This is your home.’”

NEWS BREAK

The Grandmother of Juneteenth

Opal Lee prepares to speak during a Juneteenth concert at the White House in 2023.

On June 19, 1865, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, to inform the state’s enslaved people they were free. Juneteenth, as this date is now called in the United States, was celebrated in Texas for decades before becoming a national holiday in 2021, thanks to the tireless work of a retired teacher and counselor named Opal Lee.

In 2016, at the age of 89, Lee set out to walk from her home in Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington, D.C.—a distance of 1,400 miles (2,300 kilometers)—to gather support for making Juneteenth a national holiday. Lee walked 2.5 miles per day to highlight that it took two and a half years for the enslaved people of Texas to receive the news that they were free.

The walk was the start of a multiyear effort. Lee eventually collected 1.5 million signatures and presented them to Congress. In 2021, lawmakers passed legislation to make Juneteenth a national holiday, and President Joe Biden signed it into law.

In 2024, Opal Lee was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States. Now known as the “Grandmother of Juneteenth,” Lee will turn 100 in October 2026.

“To [be] 100 years old, almost, and be able to tell some young people how it used to be so that it never happens again…I’m as proud as I can be,” Lee told CBS19 in Texas earlier this year.

Did You Know?

Actors tell each other “break a leg” instead of “good luck!” before a performance. This may be from an old superstition that wishing someone good luck could instead invite bad luck on the show.

Cast members perform in an Australian stage production of the musical Wicked.

Teens to the Rescue!

Courtesy of PLC Armidale, NSW, Australia

Teen backpackers pose for a photo on the day they rescued an injured hiker.

Thomas Wendland was hiking in one of Australia’s national parks when he slipped and felt something snap. It didn’t take long for him to realize his leg was broken and he was unable to walk. Fortunately for him, a group of teens on a multiday backpacking trip came to the rescue.

The group included several teen girls and their wilderness mentors. They were on the third day of their wilderness trip in Warrumbungle National Park, a large, forested area in the Australian state of New South Wales, when they encountered the injured Wendland. Using their wilderness first aid training, the teens carried the hiker to safety on a stretcher made of tent poles and a hammock.

“We placed my hammock over the top, and then he laid down on that and we all positioned ourselves around the outside,” said Stephanie Blake, one of the girls in the group, in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “We would count down three seconds and then lift him up altogether, then we would walk 60 seconds and then rest for 15 seconds and rotate.”

Courtesy of PLC Armidale, NSW, Australia; Photo composite Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

(left) The backpackers carry injured hiker Thomas Wendland to safety. (right) Stephanie Blake, one of the teens who helped the hiker, cooks her breakfast.

It took the team two hours to carry Wendland a little more than 2 miles (3.5 kilometers) out of the forest to a place where he could get medical help from park rangers.

The backpacking trip was part of the Duke of Edinburgh Award, a program that gets kids and young adults involved in recreation and volunteering opportunities. This same group of high school students had completed wilderness first aid training a few years earlier as a part of their outdoor adventure program and had practiced making a stretcher to carry an injured person.

Helping Wendland became an educational experience the teens will remember forever.

“It’s nice to have this story, come home and say ‘we rescued this hiker,’ and now we’ve got that safety tool in the pocket,” said Stephanie.

Happy Juneteenth!

©Tayfun Coskun—Anadolu/Getty Images

People watch a Juneteenth parade in San Francisco, California, in June 2025.

Juneteenth is a U.S. holiday that commemorates June 19, 1865, when the news of the Emancipation Proclamation finally reached enslaved people in Texas. It was on this day that people learned they were free!

Learn about the ways people celebrate this national holiday at Britannica.

WORD OF THE WEEK

thespian

PART OF SPEECH:

noun

Definition:

: actor

Definitions provided by

Sudoku

Fill in the missing digits using the numbers 1 to 9 so that each row, column, and 3 x 3 square contains every number with no repeats.

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