A Message from Kojo Clarke, Director of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

- The Parent DEI Task Force and the DEI Facilitators helped to make DEI Book recommendations for different grade levels. Many people in the community, students and adults alike, came up to let me know they were excited by some of the recommendations they’d seen and couldn’t wait to read the books. I have been fortunate to work with some amazing people in my time at NCCS, and this was one of the ways that our collective efforts were channeled into a shared activity, even though each person may have made their recommendations at different times. It served as another reminder that collectively, we bring so much diversity and creativity that we would miss if we only had a few voices contributing. So thank you to these groups who always make DEI work relevant and meaningful for our whole school, in this case by making book recommendations for our whole community benefit.

- From my office on Friday, I could hear students bemoaning the end of the Festival of Books, and I even briefly experienced the emptiness of the space when the books were initially gone. It made me consider the power of how what we see in a space impacts us emotionally and psychologically, and the burst of color that the books produced during the Festival represented a powerful array of diverse topics across different age groups and seemed to deliver something for every kind of person to learn from, young or old. It is my hope that every child and family in every school setting, library setting and in daily life, gets to experience books that really touch them, expose them to the wonder of the world, and invite them to perhaps contribute the next important book that the world needs. We recently lost a beloved community member in the person of Lavone Roberson and it was heartwarming to see that her children’s books made their way into the Festival of Books. May her shining example inspire us to similarly leave behind a positive slice of what we have to contribute to the world.