When Sophia Del Core decided to start The Mustang News at Eanes Elementary School last year, she never dreamed her efforts would culminate in winning a national award and an invitation to meet Jill and Vice President Joe Biden.

“I just didn’t know what was going around the school campus except in my grade and my brother’s and sister’s grade,” Sophia said of her idea for the newspaper at the start of her final year at Eanes.

Sophia and co-publisher Clara Lack soon had their fingers on the pulse of the school.

That was evident to the judges in the Weekly Reader Student Publishing Contest in selecting the Mustang News as the winner of elementary school publication of the year. Sophia and key contributors were rewarded with an all-expense-paid trip to Washington, D.C., to receive the award during a recent luncheon. The guest speaker was Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind.

The winning delegation received an added reward after Jill Biden could not keep her commitment to speak at the ceremony and invited them to the Biden home.

Sophia said that experience turned out to be more fun than anyone imagined.

“She invited us to a media party they were hosting, and when we drove by the Naval Observatory, we saw all bouncy houses and rock-climbing walls and we were like, ‘what is that for,’ ” Sophia recalled, adding that after lunch and a photo session with Biden and his wife, she found out that the equipment was all part of fun and games planned for her and the reporters.

“It was a lot of fun,” she said. “He [Biden] had water guns, and we were all squirting him with water guns and he squirted us.”

Even after a friend who had previously met Vice President Biden told Sophia that he was a nice family man, she was apprehensive about actually meeting him.

“But when I met him, he was really, really nice.,” Sophia noted.

Sophia helped produce nine monthly issues of the full-color, eight-page tabloid throughout the year, a monumental task she never envisioned in the beginning. She said it just blossomed with a lot of help from key friends.

One of those friends was Michael Vivio, Austin American-Statesman publisher.

Vivio, whose has two children attending Eanes Elementary, School, set up an agreement for the Statesman to print the newspaper in exchange for an only a sponsorship advertisement in each issue. Then, the Parent Teacher Organization agreed to purchase the software and computer for the newspaper.

The girls also had luck selling advertising and sponsorships to other area businesses. Few could say no to the children, whose sales pitch was, “We think each child at Eanes has an average of two parents, and so our readership will be 1,500.”

This hands-on approach netted the Mustang News $1,500, which was used to buy T-shirts for students who provided photos or articles for the newspaper. On the shirts was the phrase , “I wrote it, then I read it in the Mustang News.”

Stories, photos, drawings, cartoons and columns from a busy student body flowed as a result of that, pleas for help on the fifth-grade’s television broadcasts to each classroom, and setting up both e-mail and an “idea box” in the school office.

One of the more popular sections of the newspaper was Survey Central. In the Thanksgiving issue, which was submitted as the contest entry, Survey Central asked the question, “What’s your favorite Thanksgiving pie?” The obvious choice among 385 students responding was pumpkin (205 students) , followed by apple (57) key lime (55), cherry (48) and pecan (20). The results were cleverly depicted in a pie chart.

One of of Sophia’s many contributions to the newspaper was an advice column she co-wrote with Clara. It dealt with serious issues like bullying or stealing. With those kinds of questions, she sometimes sought input from her mother, Anne. But she was quick to point out that the newspaper made a concerted effort to hold true to a key element in its mission statement: “The Mustang News is a newspaper written by kids for kids.”

Sophia said she learned a valuable lesson from the experience.

“I gained [knowledge] that anybody can do anything, no matter how young they are,” she said.

What’s up next for Sophia? She and two of her Mustang News staff members, twin sisters, Isabelle and Valerie Morrow, hope to start a seventh-grade newspaper in August when they start classes at Hill Country Middle School.

BELOW: Sophia Del Core and her mother, Anne, take time out from a water gun fight with Vice President Joe Biden during their recent visit to his home in Washington, D.C.