Maggie Hicks, fifth grader at Mary Ellen Henderson Middle School, placed third in the nation in the Philosophy Slam essay contest.
Hicks’s essay on the the theme, “What is the Meaning of Life?” drew on her personal experience of individuals who lived life to the fullest.
Hicks and her class were surprised with the news when Pam Wilkie and Hicks’s family – family friend Catherine Hall, Hicks’s brother, Hunter, and mother and father, Todd and Gwyn Hicks – arrived with balloons.