Bangor High School’s Civil Rights Team has been hard at work this year, collecting materials to help their community celebrate African American History Month, Women’s History Month, and beyond. They recently created several calendars of content, including picture book read aloud stories to help elevate and celebrate diverse stories and cultures.  

To put the calendars together, the group researched other calendars featuring content relating to issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion and content that would align to the mission of the Civil Rights Team Project.  

“When it came to the ‘Celebrating Black Stories’ calendar, we looked specifically for videos featuring the author or illustrator doing the read aloud as a way of preserving authenticity,” said Stephanie Hendrix, English Teacher and the Civil Rights Team Advisor at Bangor High School. “We also looked at a number of different book lists for recommendations, and we paid close attention to the Coretta Scott King award winners.” 

The information was collected from various sources in the hopes of creating resources that are user friendly for teachers and students in their school community, to help them think and talk about issues related to race and skin color, national origin and ancestry, disability, and gender. 

Here are a few of the February and March calendars but the group has calendars for the other months as well: 

PDF versions of the calendars and other relevant activates to help celebrate:

“The students on my team and I understand how important it is that everyone feels safe and welcome in our school community, and one way we can help people feel not only included, but also celebrated, is by finding opportunities for them to be seen – whether through the stories we read and bring into the classroom, the poems we share that speak to the human experience, or the calendar events that help us understand that our normal may not be everyone else’s normal,” said Hendrix. “Ultimately, we don’t know what we don’t know, and the research that the Civil Rights Team has been doing to collect and curate these materials has helped us all learn more about just how diverse our school community is and just how important it is to see and celebrate everyone’s complex humanity.” 

To learn more about starting a Civil Rights Team in a Maine school, visit the Maine Attorney General’s website or reach out to Project Director Brandon Baldwin at brandon.baldwin@maine.gov.  To get copies of the other calendars, reach out to Stephanie Hendrix at shendrix@bangorschools.net.