
Our goal was to highlight the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion in children’s literature, while supporting and welcoming all families in our community. In addition to the storytime marketing costs, funds from this grant were used to purchase a large collection of books for our preschool including banned books, bilingual books and books representing the deep diversity in our school. Once approved, we had 3 weeks to execute our plans for holding a Banned Book Preschool Storytime within banned books week 2024.
We set our date, September 28th, the last day of banned books week 2024, and time to be at the busiest time of the Farmers Market which is held at the location of our preschool. We marketed to our families through newsletters and flyers, to our broader community with social media posts to groups and community listserves, added posters on school property to advertise the event. We furthermore invited our local representatives to attend via email. We selected five books to read: The Family Book by Todd Parr, Hair Love by Matthew A Cherry, And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, I am Jazz by Jazz Jennings and Our Skin by Jessica Ralli and Megan Madison. These books were read by Pilgrim Director Emily Norman and Assistant Director Maria Tellez. The day was drizzling, however we have seven families participate in the storytime. Each family received a pamphlet describing each selected book and why it was banned, important information about banned books, and contact information for local, state and US governmental representatives to advocate for diversity, equity and inclusion in access to literature. Extra pamphlets have been made available in our school entrance.

Through our advocacy in with this project, we were able to inform families and educators about the increase in banned book practices including surprising some that books such as Todd Parr’s Family Book has been challenged and banned. As we know, information is powerful! This information and funding prompted teachers in our program to review the list of banned children’s books, and select books for purchase in our program that represented and supported diversity in their classrooms. In addition, Directors from other programs contacted us to celebrate the project and wanted more information on our research of banned books lists for their own programs. We felt, though small in attendance for family participation, we were able to mobilize the early childhood community to speak up for age-appropriate standards, assessments, and classroom practices that are based on research.
We had a time crunch with fast turn around from grant approval and event, only 3 weeks, which hindered reaching more families

through a more robust marketing strategy with more notice for our local representatives to attend as well. This was the first event of this kind that we know of, so it was new to our community as well. However, we were inspired to make this an annual event for Banned Books Week in the future and are better prepared for 2025 to implement planning and outreach earlier. We will partner with the library and local early child collaboration to coordinate marketing and broader impact in the future.
$400 was used to purchase 37 new books for our library, and $100 went to marketing materials including a large evergreen banner promoting Banned Book Preschool Storytime Saturday at 9:30 am, which will be displayed in front of our preschool annually as Storytimes will be held on the Saturday of Banned Books Week evermore!