Haircuts and hundreds of free books have been part of this week’s action at Schofield Middle School, in a first-of-its-kind event for the entire student body.
“Kids ... shop for books,” said seventh-grader Allen Cummings, an honor student who was selected to help with Tuesday’s event. “Whatever book they want, they can get.”
Barber Rico Ryan, with Axis Barber Salon, was among the visitors, providing haircuts for several students for free or at a reduced rate.
Helping guide the festivities was seventh-grade geography teacher Arrington Weston, who is also the school’s lead literacy teacher, helping other teachers weave literacy into the curriculum.
“This is really just like a purpose project – something I feel like the Lord just put on my heart,” Weston said, as dozens of students perused a variety of paperback options focusing on everything from science fiction and mythology to sports heroes and classic fiction.
The idea, Weston said, is “to help our kids get into literacy, or just to incorporate literacy into things, because if we can teach our kids how to read, then so many of the problems that we see today would start to decrease.”
Hopes are for the event to become an annual tradition, Weston said. “This is the first ‘barber shop and books,’ but we had another book fair earlier in the year.”
He and Ryan decided to coordinate their efforts. Weston said, “He wanted to provide reduced-price haircuts to our scholars who couldn’t really afford them, so we ... got together and said, ‘Why don’t we put this event on?’ We prayed about it and here we are.”