Who runs this

A non-profit, run at cost.

USAEnglish is a non-profit program. Registration is pending; the numbers will be published here the day they are issued. It is run by a volunteer English teacher at Ban Han Hee School in Rattanaburi district and a Thai teacher who won this exact competition at that exact school in 2010. Neither of them takes a salary; the non-profit reimburses their actual costs and nothing more. Until the numbers are issued, write to ben@usaenglish.com and we will tell you where the filing stands.

Ploy

Ploypailin Moonsri took the gold medal in Story Telling at งานศิลปหัตถกรรมนักเรียน on November 18, 2010, at Ban Han Hee School. She was a child in a village school in Surin, standing up alone and telling a story in a language nobody at home spoke.

She received a certificate. There was no money, and there was nowhere to go next. She is a Thai teacher now, and the thing she says about it is not that she wishes she had won something — it is that she remembers exactly which children in her year did not enter, and why.

Ben Cunningham

American, a volunteer teacher at the same school. He runs the free tools on the sister sites and takes a fifteen-minute call with any teacher who asks. He draws no salary; the non-profit reimburses his costs and nothing more.

He is not a Thai education expert and does not claim to be. Almost everything on this site about how งานศิลปหัตถกรรมนักเรียน works was learned by reading Thai government documents and getting some of it wrong first.

The honest inventory

What we have actually done, and what we have not

Done: published fifty free lesson plans for coaching a storyteller; published a score sheet on OBEC's hundred points; tracked down and published the ปีการศึกษา 2569 competition dates for the districts that have announced them; built a free ten-week pronunciation clinic; and funded all of it through the non-profit.

Not done yet: run a single live final. The one described on this site is planned for April 15, 2027 and has not happened. The venue is chosen: the banquet room at Chiangmai Highlands Golf and Spa Resort. No child has been funded to travel anywhere by us, and no prize has been paid.

Never done: run an eight-city tour. Earlier versions of this site described one, with regional rounds and a final in Surin, and it named winners for 2024 and 2025. That was placeholder material written around a competition structure that never existed. It has all been removed. If you read this site before September 30, 2026 and formed an impression of a large annual event, that impression was wrong and it was our fault.

What has happened, dated, newest first → The record of every district round held, rule corrected and plan changed, with the page each line comes from. Updated monthly.

We would rather a small true story than a large false one. Everything on this site that we cannot show you a source for is either marked as a plan or has been removed.

Why a storytelling competition and not something else

Because it already exists. Every education district in Thailand runs it, it is free, tens of thousands of children enter, and by the design of the thing it rewards a child who can hold a room rather than a child whose family could pay for lessons. The hard part — organizing it, judging it, staffing it — has been done by Thai teachers, unpaid, for seventy-four editions.

What it has never had is money, and since 2565 it has had nowhere to go at the end. Those are two small, specific, fixable gaps, and they are the right size for a small non-profit.

What we do not know

We went looking for evidence that competitions make children better at speaking English, as distinct from making them more enthusiastic about it. We did not find any — not for it, not against it. So we are not going to tell you that winning a storytelling prize improves a child's English, because nobody has shown that. It makes them care, which is not nothing.

What the evidence does support is much more boring: ten weeks of short, specific, teacher-led practice on the handful of English sounds Thai speakers actually find hard. That is the work. This competition is the reason the work is worth doing — the ceremony at the end of the term, not the method.

So we built the method too, and gave it away free: Ploy Hears, a ten-week pronunciation clinic a teacher can run from one phone on a classroom screen. No login, no account, nothing stored, no charge, ever.

If we ever publish a claim on this site that we cannot show you the source for, write to ben@usaenglish.com and we will either source it or delete it.

Corrections

This site has been wrong in public more than once, and each time we have said so on the page rather than quietly editing it.

If you find another one: ben@usaenglish.com. Ben reads it himself.

Ask your school to enter your child

It is free, it happens in your own district, and the school does the entering. That is the whole ask.

เว็บขององค์กรไม่แสวงหากำไร USAEnglish · A USAEnglish non-profit site — Rattanaburi, Surin.

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USAEnglish is a non-profit program. Registration is pending; the numbers will be published here the day they are issued. Until then, write to ben@usaenglish.com and we will tell you where the filing stands. Ploy and Ben take no salary, only their expenses.