The Boothbay Region High School library and Boothbay Harbor Memorial Library teamed up for a school-wide reading of “Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You” by Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds. BHML Executive Director Joanna Breen came up with the idea after attending a Maine Humanities Council fall discussion group as Maine Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Advocacy Group chair.

“I said, 'This is for young adults, so I want to read it with young adults!' So, I reached out to (BRHS Librarian Kerrin Erhard) and said, 'Hey, do you think there would be interest?'”

Erhard said she has always wanted to do a school-wide read to promote a culture and environment of reading which seems to be slipping away, and “Stamped” seemed timely with February as National Black History Month. “If you're not seeing your teacher with a book every day or if you're not seeing your parent with a book, or if you're not seeing just people talking about reading, you get away from it. So, I thought if everybody's talking about the same book, how awesome would that be? … For me, it's another lens for people to look through when thinking about or having conversations about race and racism.”

The book is a remix of a longer book by Kendi – “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America” – which is geared toward adults. The version with Reynolds was on the February 2021 Read Across America recommended reading list for young adults, said Breen.

“He does a phenomenal job dealing with the material in terms of taking the really heavy content and really loaded American history and just putting it out there to talk about in a way that you don't find our dealings of the subject matter in history textbooks, in dry history.”

Erhard said she was worried dropping a book on the desks of all the English teachers would create too much of a burden in the middle of a semester; however, all teachers chose to take up the book.

“Of course, the collaboration with the library and having these planned Zoom meetings where Joanna would lead the discussion and have the students be involved with someone from outside the school was something that was very attractive to the teachers.”

Leading a school-wide Zoom meeting and expecting all students, classes and teachers to be in the same place in the book is not practical, said Erhard. So, only one class has read the book cover to cover, but the book has already been well received, said Breen. “I think it's a cool opportunity for the students especially because the content that it deals with is a national topic and kind of situates us right in the world we live in in a unique way. It's interdisciplinary, it's the school library, it's the public library, it's English class, it's all coming from different places to talk about it and it affects everybody on different levels.”

The reading marks the third major collaboration between BRHS and BHML in the past couple years. The first was a temporary sharing of Maine State Book Award winners which Erhard buys every year to sit in the Boothbay Region Elementary School library; Breen takes them and issues temporary bar codes so students can borrow them while school is out.

The second collaboration came last March when the schools were closed and the school libraries were not available. Breen mailed each high school student a library card and sent BRES students' parents information on how to access their library card and a self-addressed stamped envelope with registration forms for parents to return. This allowed students free access to Hoopla and Cloud Library which hold thousands of e-books and audiobooks.

The two librarians said they enjoy working together and are enjoying the reading and discussion surrounding “Stamped.”

“I stand by reading this book absolutely,” said Erhard. “I'm surprised how much I learned ... History in school was memorizing dates and events, but not the actual lives of people, what they went through and how people felt at the time those events were happening.”

Said Breen, “There is a larger national dialogue about race, racism and that history of the United States. But it hasn't really been infused into the American narrative … I like to look at it for its contribution to our understanding of history and literature.”