The library has been trying to diversify West High with a new book club and movie screening that took place recently. After receiving the results of social climate surveys, and having some concerning results, the book club leaders decided to focus on diversity in order to help make everyone feel included. Including The Hate U Give, Dear Martin, Poet X as the books.

After the popularity of ¨The Hate U Give¨, and seeing the results of that study, I spent all of last year trying to read as many books as possible that featured somebody who was the main character who didn’t look like me, and didn’t come from a small Midwestern town as I did,” said Librarian Jill Hofmockel.
“Representation is important,” Hofmockel said. The librarians felt it was important for the library to reflect the diversity in our school. “All of those kids deserved to have themselves celebrated or, you know, brought forward and so that’s what we decided to do with this book club.”
The book club that meets in the library attempts to create an opportunity for students here to talk about diversity and representation. The book club does not only focus on books they even organized a movie screening playing the movie The Hate U Give at Marcus Theaters.“Ms. Belding and I thought wouldn’t it be awesome if we could watch it, and so we’re like, why don’t we just call them?” said Hofmockel.
The book club had to sell at least 150 tickets at the full ticket price of $6. To make it easier for students to attend, they decided to use the library’s donation funds to pay for half the cost. With the logistics settled, the actual success fell upon the students to buy enough tickets. “So then the first few days we were selling, we only sold like 20 tickets. Yeah, a little bit by little bit by little bit. And then we sold 160 tickets. And of course, we should have known that you know, everyone would wait till the last minute. Yeah, It got scary there for a while.” said Hofmockel.
About 145 people showed up to the movie, where the smell of free popcorn and feelings of excitement lit up the air. While the commercials were playing, students filled the theatre with chatter and murmurs. When the movie started, however, everyone was respectful and quiet. The audience flinched, gasped, laughed, and cheered along with the characters on screen. There where more than a few teary eyes in the room.
“I heard a lot of people talk about [the movie],” said Dilara Guran ’21 a student who attended both the movie and book club meeting. “I’ve been in a lot of discussions where we talked about it, even not in school, we talked about it with friends and online. And it was like an amazing thing because I saw a lot of people realize things that they didn’t know before.”
For anyone who is interested, the book club plans to meet once a week in the library on Nov. 13 and the next book they are planning to read are Poet X and have already had a meeting planned.
“I would again[attend the next book club meeting] because when the teachers were talking about the book and gave a summary about it I actually enjoyed it,” Guran said. Going forward, they plan to focus every month on a book that has a different main character who is from a group that is marginalized in one way or another.

Only the first three books have been chosen so far The Hate U Give, Dear Martin and Poet X because the book club wants students to pick the next book. As a part of something called ‘Own Voices’, they hope that the selected books feature an author who belongs to the minority group of the main character. The book club already brought in Nick Stone, author of Dear Martin, to visit West High.
The book club intends to have a section for Diversity on MLK day, and encourages students to read and discuss their featured books. While a not a lot of people showed up to the book club meeting, they’re not worried as long as the discussion happens.

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“I know that kids read that book,” Hofmockel said. “Yeah, and I know that more kids read the book because we had it out on display for a while. And I know that kids will read Poet X as well, even if they don’t come and hopefully they’re talking about and I know that kids read Dear Martin and talked about it. I still think that like, maybe a problem is like, they don’t want to show that they read.”
A Skype call is also planned with the author of The Poet X, Elizabeth Acevedo. “I want kids that go to West High to know that we think that their representation in stories matters and that we’re working hard on it, and that we hope that kids feel like they’re being seen and that we see them for who they really are,” Hofmockel said.“I’m gonna steal from “(author)” Jason Reynolds. He says ‘I want kids to know that we see them for who they are. Not for who everybody thinks they are.’ And that’s powerful to me. That’s something we’re trying to do here.”