Every Shout Mouse Book in EVERY DCPS School!

April 3, 2015 Kathy Crutcher

In the summer of 2013, Mark Hecker of Reach, Inc. asked me to help his DC teens write books for the kids they were tutoring. I said YES, and the power of that work opened up a new path. Within the year, Shout Mouse Press was born, and now those original 4 books have grown to 12, by 65 different at-risk teen authors, from DC to Haiti. And now those books are in demand.

Today, Mark and I delivered nearly 1,000 of our teen-authored books to DCPS Libraries, who want every one of our titles in every single DC Public School.

Every book in every school. You should have seen our authors’ faces when we got to tell them that news.

It’s a good day for Reach, for Shout Mouse, and for all our authors, including those from Restavek Freedom Foundation, Beacon House, and Ballou SHS. And next week when those books go on the shelves and the first curious readers pick them up to read, it will be pretty much the best.

Thank you, DC Public Schools !! And a huge thank you to Kate Mester, Special Librarian for DCPS, who made this all possible. Check out some excerpts from our conversation about why DCPS wants to support diverse literature, diverse authors, and empowering books by unheard voices.

Kate Mester: [The Shout Mouse books] truly reflect our students, especially because it’s so empowering that our own students are writing these stories for themselves, for kids just like them, which is all of our kids, and that’s not happening as much in popular publishing right now. And so it’s so cool for kids to think, like, ‘You did that? I could do that! Like, you’re basically me in ten years!’ And I think that’s really exciting, too. One of my professors in grad school was like, ‘Students learn from you, but who do students also learn from? Other students, right?’ So if it comes from their peers, I think it’s so much more powerful. And the more kids see themselves reflected in books, the more they’re going to be interested in what they’re reading, and there’s such an important element of choice and agency, too. It’s outside the curriculum and they get to be empowered to choose what it is they want to read, and they’re going to want to read that. Kathy: Awesome. And you mentioned that DCPS libraries is making a real push to diversify bookshelves, too, right? Kate Mester: Yes, to really walk through our collections with a critical eye and to really start thinking about it. I’m hoping that especially with this allotment that we really start looking at collection development plans. Not just [in terms of] age and development, but in cultural literacy of what reflects our kids. We Need Diverse Books is doing that, but we can start making that happen, too. And student authors are a huge part of that change.

Kate Mester of DCPS and Kathy of Shout Mouse