LOS LUNAS — A group of students from Los Lunas High School’s service learning classes organized a literacy night for the whole community to enjoy on Dec. 11.
The event at LLHS featured arts and crafts, games, a book read from local author Rachel Bates and a lot of free books and camaraderie.
“It’s amazing seeing it all come together because we’ve been planning this for so long,” said Jessica Romero, a LLHS junior in the group.
The literacy night served as a capstone project for three students in the service learning class. The students were encouraged to create projects dedicated to an issue they are interested in addressing in Valencia County.
Romero said they chose to focus on literacy because they have noticed a decrease in literary interest within the community and being avid readers, they wanted to turn this around.
“We want to get people interested in reading, especially from a young age because then they’ll grow up liking to read books,” said senior Kylie Boone, one of the three group members.
A group of LLHS students organized a literacy night for the whole community to enjoy. Pictured, from left, Mckinzey Stanley, Jessica Romero and Kylie Boone.
Romero said when collecting book donations, they noticed another issue they also want to address through their service learning class.
“We noticed a clear issue of not enough Spanish or bilingual books,” said Romero. “We were surprised that they’re so hard to obtain considering the amount of bilingual and Spanish speakers there are in our community.”
One way they’re hoping to address this, Romero said, is to advocate for more bilingual books in libraries and to start reading bilingual books to elementary students so students who aren’t fluent in English don’t feel left out.
“The language barrier can really isolate those students and we don’t want that,” said Romero.
Through their mission to revamp reading, Boone said they also want to look into creating little libraries to put in the school and around the community. Little libraries are small book storage areas set in public spaces that people can take books from and add books into for others to enjoy.
Boone said they hope to host another literacy night in the future. In the meantime, she said they plan on finding more ways to get the community engaged with reading while promoting more bilingual representation.
“We’re going to see where it goes from here because we can’t tackle everything, but we would like to tackle as much as we can while we’re still at LLHS and hopefully it can continue once we’ve graduated,” said Boone.
Felina Martinez was born and raised in Valencia County. She graduated from the University of New Mexico in 2021. During her time at UNM, she studied interdisciplinary film, digital media and journalism. She covers the village of Los Lunas, Los Lunas Schools, the School of Dreams Academy and the town of Peralta.
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May 2, 2024
