Personal Essay

By Reagan Treharne

2025 Anne MacKay Scholarship winner Reagan Treharne of Southold High School.

I love to volunteer in my community and I have done so in a variety of ways during my high school career. I have been a part of Habitat for Humanity builds, coordinated blood drives, gleaned local farms for CAST, and more. Yet, there is one service activity I completed that stands out above the rest for what it taught me and how it impacted some very special kids in Southold Elementary School. In my school district, there is a large Spanish speaking community. Many kids begin at Southold Elementary with little to no English. When I had the opportunity to shadow the elementary school librarian (as part of career day) I was saddened to see how few Spanish books were on the shelves. I wondered if I was missing something. Sadly, I wasn’t. I was already brainstorming a project plan for my Girl Scout Gold Award, but I quickly changed gears. It bothered me deeply that with so many Spanish speaking kids, there were very few accessible titles available to them. How would they grow a love of reading? How must this feel to them? I wondered. So, over the summer, I created an interactive bilingual “little library.” I got school administration approval and a go-ahead from the elementary librarian and I got to work. In my “little library,” I included two new publications for each grade level, kindergarten through sixth grades. I researched, then read each book and focused on including diverse characters and voices. With each new title I paired an English and Spanish version and a folder of interactive activities I created based on each book. All activities provided were bilingual and ranged from “search and find maps” and games, to QR code-linked extension lessons, to bilingual read-alouds, to manipulatives. The project took me well over 100 hours to complete.

I called my little library “Aventuras en la Lectura”/“Adventures in Reading” and I set it up on a rocket ship bookshelf I found at a yard sale. On the first day of school, I situated my display at the library entrance. At the end of that day, I went back to check-in. Every one of the 14 books and interactive folders had been checked out and the librarian had to create a wait list. The librarian had tears in her eyes as she told me how excited the native Spanish speakers were to see all of the new opportunities to read and interact with their new books. Then, when their English speaking classmates chose the same books in English, they paired up to look at the different covers, read, and look through their folders together. I am very proud that my project offered more equitable accessibility to diverse, bilingual texts, while also making reading fun. It also allowed new friendships to form, bridging language barriers among students. Since that first day of school, the elementary librarian and I have met every couple of months to update titles and create more activities to keep the little library fresh. She has told me she plans to keep it going after I head to college, which I am so happy to hear.

I want to be an elementary school teacher. I love learning and I love teaching. I volunteer as a peer tutor for fellow high school students and I am a “book buddy” in my elementary school once a week. I did this particular project because I saw something I thought was unjust and inequitable. Equity in education is something I believe strongly in. Every student deserves to be able to learn and have accessible materials. I thought completing my project would make me feel good because I delivered materials for student use that did not exist before and I hoped that kids would get excited about reading. What I did not anticipate was how much joy and connectedness can come when students feel empowered in a classroom. The native Spanish speakers were so proud to have books they could read with mastery and share the experience with their classmates. This was something they had not had the opportunity to do before through their use of the school library. This little library closed social gaps and made kids feel safe and seen; this, for me, was a wonderful takeaway. In the future, I want to be the kind of teacher who makes every child feel essential and valued and this project was my first step towards that.