End of school year, 2025-2026

What an amazing final week of school at Santa Rosa Charter School for the Arts: with a Pride celebration that united our community, followed the very next day by a Promotion Ceremony for our departing eighth-graders.
https://youtu.be/dGNPPg2g1NE

H.R. 2616, another tool for censorship

Among worrying legislation at the federal level, H.R. 2616 recently passed in the U.S. House of Representatives. It’s troubling enough that, under certain circumstances, schools would be forced to “out” trans students to their parents, but I’m concerned about Section 3’s prohibition against “teaching or advancing gender ideology.”

Endlessly Ever After by Laurel Snyder and Dan Santat

Ever since the arrival in my library of Endlessly Ever After by Laurel Snyder and Dan Santat, I’ve looked forward to featuring it as a read-aloud. It features choose-your-own-adventure storytelling similar to the mass-market books I used to devour as a young person: except that Endlessly Ever After is a beautiful example of the picture-book format with its lavish, full-color, and evocative illustrations. This week, I debuted it with my school’s two third-grade classes; each class experienced a very different outcome as determined by the choices they voted upon each step along the way. Endlessly Ever After was the winner, in 2026, of the California Young Reader Medal in its “Primary” category.

Don’t comply with censorship in advance

In his recently published short book of essays, Mac Barnett emphasized the importance of children finding their experiences and emotions reflected in the stories they read. His observation was made against a backdrop of ever-increasing attempts to remove books from libraries that disproportionately target books by authors of color and authors who are LGBTQIA+.

Recent arrivals in SRCSA library: Books with YA appeal

I recently accepted an invitation to select books from the library of a local middle school that is slated to close. It was a great opportunity to add books to SRCSA library that might appeal to our sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade students.