Walpole and the UD team represented a wonderful opportunity to engage in understanding the science behind how kids learn to read,” said Becky Neubert, principal of Seaford Central Elementary School. Originally conceived by Walpole, professor in the School of Education, and her late colleague, Michael McKenna of the University of Virginia, Bookworms has become a national example for innovative, equitable and outcomes-driven ELA curriculum. While many factors contribute to changes in student assessment scores, Seaford’s improvements in elementary ELA proficiency coincided with the implementation of Bookworms.

Today, the school district remains one of the highest performing in the area of English Language Arts (ELA) in all of Delaware. Yet, in 2019, the percentage jumped to 53%, and during the challenging 2020-21 academic year, proficiency remained high at 41% - on par with the overall state average. In 2015, Seaford ranked last among 19 school districts in Delaware with less than 32% of students achieving proficient scores on the state’s Smarter Balanced Assessment. Students’ love of reading and their literacy achievement exploded. Six years ago, the district adopted the aptly titled Bookworms curriculum, an open access literacy program for kindergarten through fifth grade (K-5) teachers developed by University of Delaware professor Sharon Walpole and published online by Open Up Resources. (Picture book/biography.In Delaware’s Seaford School District, this experience is a common one for elementary school teachers and principals. All the events are depicted in emotive naive artwork that underscores their truth Ringgold delivers Parks’s story without hyperbole, but rather as a life lived with pride, conviction, and consequence.

These experiences make her refusal to release her seat all the more courageous, for the consequences of resistance were not gentle. Ringgold, through the bus, also informs readers of Parks’s youth in rural Alabama, where Klansmen and nightriders struck fear into the lives of African-Americans.

A decent amount of the material will probably be new to children, for Parks is so intimately associated with the Montgomery Bus Boycott that her work with the NAACP before the bus incident is often overlooked, as is her later role as a community activist in Detroit with Congressman John Conyers. Narrating the book is the bus that Parks took that morning 45 years ago it recounts the signal events in Parks’s life to a young girl who boarded it to go to school. Ringgold’s biography of Rosa Parks packs substantial material into a few pages, but with a light touch, and with the ring of authenticity that gives her act of weary resistance all the respect it deserves.

Duke Ellington by Andrea Davis Pinkney