If there was a moment that encapsulated Thursday’s Read Across Flagler Literacy Event at Palm Coast’s Central Park, the first of its kind in Flagler County, it was when third-grader Noelle Castello was at the Public Library booth getting a customized button from Penny Gerlach that she could pin to her shirt, a very popular stop for the scores who dropped by the two-hour event. “I want the ‘Reading Is My Passion’ one,” Noelle said.
She should know: she was a winner two years running at Rymfire Elementary’s Battle of the Books, when children show their literacy mettle after meeting the challenge of reading 15 or more books. But then, scarcely anyone who went to Thursday’s celebration of books didn’t have at least some of that passion. It’s what the event’s organizers intended: Flagler County schools’ media specialists, with the support of the district’s Celeste Ackerman, had put it all together, some of them spending money out of their pocket to ensure its success.
“We’ve all talked about for a long time doing a district-wide thing, and it’s never happened till now,” says Melanie Tahan, the media specialist at Rymfire Elementary who promoted the event. The point of it all was “to promote literacy and reading no matter what’s going on,” Tahan said, “and make it fun, promote the joy of reading,” added colleague Catie Brandner, the media specialist at Matanzas High School. “I’m inspired and uplifted by attending this.”
Why read? “That pursuit of knowledge, developing empathy as we read–so many reasons, and they’re all valid,” Brandner said, including the simple connection that any reader would understand: “I love this book. I love this beautiful book.”
“We believe in what we do,” Tahan said, speaking for every media specialist.
The various booths included a group of Flagler Palm Coast High School Student Government Association members, anchored by senior Nigel-Ginola Njok, who played “name that quote” with passing kids, from favorite children’s books, two booths that gave away books (upward of 300 were given away at Teaching and Learning Specialist Kristin Frank’s booth, crates-full were given away at the Flagler County Public Library’s booth), one booth was busy with kids drawing their own bookmarks, the baked goods booth was, of course, just as busy, and so on, each booth its own little chapter in a big story.
There was even a story between the lines: it’s no small matter that the event was the work of the district’s media specialists, pound for pound the single-most besieged group of professionals in the district in the last couple of years of book bans, disrespect and ignorant rhetoric from the very school board members who should be championing them. The specialists’ ranks show the toll: a third of the district’s schools lost their experienced specialists along the way–specialists who would wear that button Noelle wanted–disheartened as they were, for the most part, over the statewide war on books.
In her previous role as assistant superintendent, Superintendent LaShakia Moore had been the media specialists’ supervisor and had gone as far as existing and mutating law would allow her to protect them, even drafting a policy that, for a short time, seemed to turn libraries into freedom-to-read sanctuaries. The policy soon proved moot in the face of censorship mandated by the state. The local School Board did nothing to shield either media specialists or libraries, standing by as shelves were purged of books that could risk draw a challenge. There are reports of one school board member showing up. (County Commission Chairman Andy Dance also did).
Just as well: It was a storybook scene–or rather, a Storywalk: The moment you walked into Central Park you were greeted by a series of panels, a couple of dozen or so, alternating between short chapter summaries and drawings that together summarized stories like Adam Rubin’s Dragons Love Tacos (we’re in the Year of the Dragon, which explains the inflated dragon at the entrance) or Christopher Denise’s Night Owl, and the first chapter of Amar Shah’s Play the Game.
Look up from the panels, and what could you see? Shah himself.
Shah, whose Play the Game: The Hoop Con was published this week by Scholastic (and who wrote a famous essay in the Washington Post six years ago defending the Simpsons character Apu (“To many Indian Americans, Apu is offensive. To me, he’s my dad“), was the featured speaker. Judging from the size of the crowd that had gathered before him, it’s not likely that most of those who preferred to amble around the dozen and a half displays in a half crescent around the lake realized that they had a big deal writer among them.
Shah spoke of writing and reading with the excitement of someone talking about Kobe Bryant, the late NBA superstar he’d spent half an hour talking with when he was a junior in high school during a photo shoot in Orlando, and when Bryan had just graduated from high school. “Kobe and I ended up talking for about 30 minutes, like two friends,” he said. Two years later the Lakers were practicing at Shah’s high school. He remembered Shah, and the two spent more time talking. “Actually he gave me his practice jersey,” Shah said.
Shah was rather coolly interviewed before the crowd by Lukas Notaras, a 10th grader at Matanzas who had no idea he’d be tasked with playing Charlie Rose, and who pulled it off without notes or skipping beats. When he asked Shah what his all-time favorite book was, he couldn’t have predicted that it would be a trigger to one of Shah’s favorite subjects.
As a child, Shah said it would have to be either Superfudge or Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume. But since childhood, it’s been The Great Gatsby, the book he considers to be the most perfectly written book in the American language, the book he reads once a year, the book that has affected his trajectory as a writer, the book he could “spend all day talking about.”
“What’s great about authors is you get a chance to look at them as if they’re branches on a tree, you read one author, then you read what that author really liked. And then you begin to form your own sort of library of influences,” Shah said. He spoke about incorporating the cultural traditions of his own Hindu heritage into his work: “Like, Indian kids dominate the spelling bee like the Patriots used to dominate the Super Bowl,” he said by way of example. “And so I’ve kind of played a joke with that and my character goes to a spelling bee class. He’s not a great speller, the other kids are. It was fun to just be able to use those aspects of my culture to just to normalize them, because that’s the life that I lived every day.”
Notaras asked him if he always knew he’d be a writer. “I had the confidence that I knew I could be a writer,” Shah said. “I just didn’t have the discipline to do it until until my son was born. I mean, I would write essays, I would write articles, but writing a book, it takes a set of exercises, but I think that that discipline, I got after I realized that I have somebody more important to take care of.”
Standing at a short distance with her “baby daughter,” as she called the young woman next to her (who was holding Shah’s book in one hand), Moore, the superintendent, listened to Shah and smiled knowingly. “I am super excited that our media specialists, our literacy coaches are really just thinking about ideas that can get literacy out into the community to promote reading within our community. I love that it’s outside of the walls of our school,” Moore said. “What I would love to see happen with this is that our community comes in and becomes involved in it as we continue to do this. Maybe parents who have decided to homeschool or some of our our families that are a part of our private schools, that they come and be a part of this as well as we continue to move forward and bring literacy out into the community.” (There were some homeschooling families at the event.)
Since this was a literacy event, it was natural to ask what Moore, who’s always reading, was reading just then. Aside from Brene Brown’s Dare to Lead, she’s just finished Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water, which, in a coincidental echo of Shah’s visit, happens to be set in India. “It’s it’s a long read, it was definitely kind of complicated to keep up with the pieces,” Moore said (it’s a 700-page book), summarizing its theme: “How we sometimes keep our secrets or keep things that have been a barrier or burden for our families, and we don’t address them. And our families just continue to deal with them year over a year. ”
The plan is to make the literacy celebration an annual event.
