Mini Grant Recipient, Jordan Cimenski

March 26th, 2025 /
Spencer Tuinei /
Foundation, News, Schools, Secondary Schools, Shoreline Middle

“Students really need practice with this these days,” Jordan Cimenski, an English teacher at Shoreline Middle School. She’s a previous Provo Way recipient via student and teacher nominations, a Utah Jazz Most Valuable Educator Award winner, and, interestingly, a published author. Her accolades and actions establish her as a leader amongst students and teachers alike across Provo. So what does she see as a need for our students?

Cimenski believes in the power of starting and finishing full-length texts and novels. To address this, she applied for our Mini Grant, a funding opportunity provided by the Provo City School District Foundation to support innovative classroom projects, ensuring each student would have access to their own book for a given unit.

For readers who have lived through and watched the digital age rise, there is an urgent issue emerging from an obvious truth: the world and its media forms are increasingly atomized and reduced. These technological and cultural shifts change the way we and our youth interact with media: similarly reduced, stripped of context, devoid of empathy. It affects how we and our children and our parents read and understand the world– even in the way we relate and think about each other in our closest friends and families.

In Cimenski’s classroom, students combat this zeitgeist, engaging with literature as a way to understand perspectives, wrestle with conflicting ideas, and make meaningful connections to the people and places around them.

Recognizing the urgency of preserving deep reading skills, Cimenski saw the district’s sudden curriculum shift as an opportunity to address this challenge head-on. English teachers were left without full copies of the books they were expected to teach. “It happened so suddenly that we did not have any copies of the full texts yet,” Cimenski explained. “This meant we could only teach using excerpts, which does limit our options a lot.” Without access to full books, teachers were forced to rely on isolated sections—snapshots rather than full portraits.

Thanks to the Provo City School District Foundation’s Mini Grant, Cimenski and her colleagues secured full-length novels for their classrooms, giving students the chance to truly engage with literature instead of just skimming excerpts. “By having these books, it allows us to push students to read full novels, but also allows students to read more in-depth and learn things like plot, character development, structure, and theme more effectively.”

The impact was immediate. “All the English teachers are super excited about having these books since A., we know they’re safe to use and approved by the district, and B., it allows us to go super in-depth into full-length texts.”

Using her books, fellow teachers are looking at book-unit projects, reading groups, role-playing activities, and creative applications, like book trailers or skits.

Beyond a logistical fix, it underlies a fundamental, philosophical shift: she’s making space for context, empathy, role play, teamwork, creativity, and critical evaluation. It takes more for each student, and the gains are equally as great.

Teachers are helping students recognize the value of context, nuance, and patience—qualities that extend far beyond the classroom. And, thanks to our Mini Grant program, students are getting the opportunity to not just read, but to truly experience literature in its full scope.

For those who wonder why this matters, the answer is blindingly simple, down to the cliche: a book is more than its cover. And an English classroom is more than a place to prepare for tests. It is a space where students learn to think, to imagine, to empathize, to grow.

That’s what makes the work of teachers like Jordan Cimenski essential. And that’s why programs like the Mini Grant matter—not just for education, but for the kind of readers, thinkers, and citizens we hope to shape.