Celebration cheers 25,000 inclusive books placed in the hands of Kansas City children

Some of the inclusive books on display at the Fire House event hall.

This much Turn the Page KC knows for sure — more than 25,000 inclusive books are scattering through schools into the hands of Kansas City children since Turn the Page teamed with LINC to win an OMG Books grant from FirstBook.

But what a celebratory crowd Friday morning could only imagine is how many young lives will soar higher on the same literary fuel that propelled the many speakers who gathered at Kansas City’s Fire House event hall to honor the effort.

Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas remembered the moment his young self stood in a library, having worked his way into the non-fiction section, when he held a biography up to a librarian and asked:

Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas

“Who is this Nelson Mandela?”

That moment, like those that other speakers shared, personalized the mission that Turn the Page KC and LINC have taken into the Kansas City Public Schools, Hickman Mills School District and public charter schools to provide books that match the demographic diversity of their students.

“I started reading more about the world in different ways,” Lucas said. “That’s what creating opportunities — what inclusion in books — does for young people. It leads to so many things. It led to me being in the position I am in now.”

Everyone has those books they remember most, LINC Caring Communities Site Coordinator Jene Counts told the crowd. She was lucky, guided by a family of educators, to be given books as a child like Amazing Grace by Mary Hoffman and Caroline Binch.

Counts’ after-school program at Millennium at Santa Fe Elementary School in Hickman Mills has distributed hundreds of the books.

“I got to see myself in my books,” she said. “It’s important to me to impart that on to my students.”

Friday, Turn the Page KC invited a dozen elementary public charter schools to take boxes of the books for their classrooms.

Teachers with Frontier School of Innovation look over new books for their charter schools.

Venita Thurman of Kansas City’s Girls Preparatory Academy

“I love opening children’s books and seeing people who look like my niece, who look like my little sisters, who look like my students,” said Venita Thurman, the director of student support at Girls Preparatory Academy of Kansas City.

“I appreciate the multiple perspectives now being placed in our students hands,” she said. “So our kids get to learn about cultures different than their own, understand people’s backgrounds and where they’re coming from and not be afraid, but embrace differences.”

Lucas urged the audience “to double-down,” because the “true difference-makers” are “all of you, caring and changing the world, looking after little kids like young Quinton.”

And just maybe, said Vanessa Vaughn West, the director of diversity and inclusion at Lathrop GPM, another gathering can be held 20 years from now, and a room full of today’s children now grown will all be able to think of a book “that had a character like them, or exposed them to a character that was different from them.”

Turn the Page wants to carry on the work, and is seeking contributions.

Turn the Page has published a list of inclusive books here.

And donations to inclusive book distribution can be made at Turn the Page’s website here.

“Making sure that the books kids have at school and at home look like them is an important initiative,” said Turn the Page KC Executive Director Mike English. “And frankly it’s one of the funnest things we’ve ever done.”

Turn the Page KC Executive Director Mike English helps carry boxes of books for Scuola Vita Nuova charter school.