Boasting about their offspring's achievements just got easier for proud Harvard parents.

Beginning this year, undergraduates can authorize the Harvard News Office to inform their hometown newspapers when they win academic awards.

The News Office sent release forms to all first-years over the summer. About 800 students, roughly half the class, filled them out, said Debra B. Ruder, assistant news director.

The News Office will automically send news releases to the hometown newspapers of those students who returned the forms, reporting matriculation, graduation and awards such as the Detur, Bowdoin and Hoopes prizes.

Upperclass students will receive release forms sometime this fall. The News Office may expand the program, which currently employs one undergraduate, to report awards in athletics, dramatics, music and other extracurricular activities, said Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68.

The only problem the News Office anticipates is keeping up with the dizzying pace of awards received by undergraduates, Ruder said.

"We're not going to be able to announce all of the honors because there are so many of them," she said.

Lewis and Ruder said the News Office began offering the service because many undergraduates lose touch with their hometowns when they go away to Harvard.

"People have said that students who go to their local state university remain very much on the horizon of their hometowns as their achievements are reported in the local newspaper, but the student--often the best student in the school--who goes off to Harvard seems to drop off the face of the earth and never be heard about again," Lewis wrote in an e-mail.

That may have happened to Lukasz M. Fidkowski '01. Fidkowski, who did not return the release form because he "didn't think this was particularly important," said he will "probably" lose touch with his hometown, Macungie, Pa., because his family only recently moved there.

The service may be more useful to students from small towns, where newspapers are more likely to report students' awards, said Judy Fox, director of the Harvard-Radcliffe Parents' Association.

"Parents enjoy knowing that other people are reading about what their students are doing, especially in the smaller towns where maybe the student who's going to Harvard is amongst a minority of kids from the town that have ever been to a major institution," said Fox, whose son graduated from the College in 1995. "It means a lot to the people in the small town who may be behind this particular student."

But Manuela T. Arciniegas '01, who comes from New York City, didn't return the release form because she thought her achievements wouldn't make it into New York's newspapers anyway.

"I really doubt that I'd get in it," she said. "I don't think any New Yorkers care.