They’re not just reading across Flagler. They’re writing.
Last Year’s inaugural Read Across Flagler event in Palm Coast’s Central Park featured a celebrated children’s author as its main attraction. The event, organized by the district’s media specialists and its teaching and learning division, celebrates reading and gives students some familiarity with the authors behind the books.
So this year Celeste Ackerman, who coordinated it all, focused on the district’s own authors as the event unfolder at Central Park last Thursday afternoon.
There they were, the older ones, with the books they’d published on Amazon: Kala, a 261-page near-murder-mystery MacKenzie Wheat, a Flagler Palm Coast High School ninth grader, wrote in a month. Or Caleb Hathaway, a senior at FPC, who took longer to write The Gunrunner’s Gambit (three months), a historical mystery set in Flagler and St. Johns counties that germinated out of an old road Hathaway found and documented with a drone. He kept thinking about it until a story of gun-smuggling. He finished it when he was 16 and is now working on his second novel. (His first sold 150 copies, not a bad showing for a first self-published effort.)
Or Abbigail Standish and The Prophesy of Time’s End, “the story of two siblings separated by the universe.” That one emerged out of a 7th grade assignment that turned into a short story that turned into a full-length novel. It took her until sophomore year to finish the first draft.
They all want to be writers to a degree. “I’ll pursue it and see where it takes me,” Hathaway said, though he’s not entirely committing to it like MacKenzie Wheat. You can see it in her eyes hear it in her determination. This is a prolific Simenon in the making. It’s what she wants to do, though just as she published Kala, another author came up with an identical title. Her second title’s first draft is all done. She has a plan. “I might try getting an agent, try to get my name out there, and then maybe I’ll go back to self-publishing,” Wheat said.
Superintendent LaShakia Moore was asking as many questions of the authors as a reporter, amazed at their dedication. “I love it,” she cheered as the authors described their writing process. That’s what the event was about. “It’s really about bringing literature outside of the walls of our schools and into the community, so each year I believe that it’s going to expand,” Moore said. She thought she might have the authors marketed in a few schools to speak about writing and publishing.
Younger authors were also featuring the work they’d developed through the Josh Crews Writing Project, the annual publishing effort that results in a thick volume of the district’s best writers’ work (Margaret Reiter of Wadsworth Elementary, Adela Rodriguez of Belle Terre Elementary, Victoria Rivera of Bunnell Elementary, Logan Glover of Old Kings Elementary, Laila Gray of Indian Trails Middle, Bella Gregory of Buddy Taylor Middle).
Moore is an avid reader. These days she’s been reading the podcaster and author Mel Robbins’s Let Them Theory. “It’s all about letting people do and be and make the choices that they are going to make, and then you make the choice that is best for you. It’s kind of how it sums it up,” Moore said.
Her readings aside, Moore is thinking a lot about how how technology is changing the reading experience among younger people, who have grown up with devices in their hands. “I think the students are experiencing not just reading, but content, almost like you see it on social media. They want content and reading in these reels, short video, short moments, short excerpts that they can read,” Moore said. “I don’t know that it’s negatively impacting or positively impacting. It’s just we’re having to adapt in order to make sure that they can still access the content.” She pointed to books around her at the event: te district now has to find a way to ensure that students can access the books in digital formats, as they may be less likely to pick up hard copies.
“My daughter specifically is one,” the superintendent said. “She loves to read, but right now she’s in this phase that she loves listening to books, and that’s okay with me, because I want her to enjoy reading and enjoy listening to different information.”
This year, she said, Read Across Flagler invited clubs and other members of the community to host the tables to help students “be excited about reading and all things literature.”
A half dozen volunteers from the Flagler Palm Coast High School Student Government Association (SGA, an organization with some 200 members) had set up a game booth where younger children could roll a wheel of chance and try their skills at putting certain phrases together based on the letters the wheel gave them. There was a petting zoo and a balloon art station. The public library had a free-book stand with the ever-popular button machine–“Lose yourself in a book,” “Read more scroll less,” “Books are a uniquely portable magic,” or one of those buttons that, alas, requires a suspension of disbelief these days: “The world belong to those who read.”
Kristin Frank and Heidi Alves, teaching and learning specialists at the district office, had a huge pile of books in great variety to give away. “I collect them from community members, teachers that are retiring, media centers that are going to exit them, different schools, and then I keep them in my house,” Frank said, giving them away at Flagler school events. “I also give them away at Grace Food Pantry, so that way every child in Flagler has books in their home.”
Alves does likewise. “We have kids all across the county that don’t have any books,” she said.
Alves and Frank also promotes the University of Florida’s New Worlds Reading Initiative, a program that provides children in VPK through fifth grade a free book every month during the school year (in English, Spanish, Haitian Creole and Braille, moronic English-as-national-language edicts notwithstanding). To be eligible, a child must be having difficulties keeping up at grade level (technically, those in the 40th percentile or below in reading), but Frank said she’s yet to hear of anyone being turned down. (You may apply here.)
“This is an incredible activity,” School Board member Lauren Ramirez said. “I have seen students as young as 2 years old walking around, infants, high school students are out here participating. They’re volunteering. They’re actively going to the tables. There’s authors that are local, and I feel like that gives kids hope to aspire if they want to be an author. They’re right here.”
Ramirez has four children of her own. “For me as a mom, this is incredible, because one, there’s free books everywhere. They’re in green shape. And my kids, they love to read. They’re not all the best at reading, but they still love to read, and it’s awesome.”
The event seemed to draw considerably more people than last year. “It grew because I think that word got out last year out of the success,” Ackerman said. “We advertised as best we could. I think bringing in the petting zoo made a difference. Balloon art. We just tried to fancy it up.” If she could sum it up, Ackerman said, “I love that we as a district had an opportunity to spotlight the amazing authors within our school district and the kids that are doing great things.”
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