The PLP in Action Pilot Program
Delilah Delgado
This February, six classrooms at Atlanta Neighborhood Charter School participated in the first ever PLP in Action Pilot Program, spearheaded by PLP Teachers’ Advisory Committee member Nicole Agadoni. Motivated by her passion for inclusive education and her belief in the value of LGBTQ+ stories, Nicole oversaw this highly successful program, which provided an incredible opportunity for PLP to connect directly with classrooms and students.
Nicole grew up and attended school in a conservative suburb of Georgia and remained in-state for her undergraduate years at Georgia State University, where she was tasked with an assignment to create a “diverse text set” for an elementary school classroom. Nicole knew immediately that she wanted to create a text set emphasizing LGBTQ+ representation. She scoured the shelves of public libraries, delved into online research, and used every resource she could imagine in her attempt to find LGBTQ-inclusive reading materials. But in the end, she could only obtain three physical books and a few online titles.
Now, through her work as a third-grade teacher and her involvement with PLP, Nicole has created a welcoming, open, LGBTQ-friendly classroom library of her own. LGBTQ-inclusive children’s books are far more readily available—though not always encouraged or supported, especially at schools in the South. However, Nicole volunteered herself and her colleagues to implement the first-ever PLP in Action Pilot Program. “It’s ingrained in our mission and vision to celebrate diversity,” she explained. “We read banned books here.” With the support of her administration and the willing participation of six other teachers, Nicole set out to launch the Pilot Program.
Each participating teacher selected a PLP-featured book that would best compliment their classroom library and curriculum. Nicole especially encouraged teachers to choose books with the students they serve in mind. “Maybe some books might be a mirror or a window for those kids,” she told them. “Make it as personal as you can.” For her own third grade class, Nicole selected Strong, written by Eric Rosswood and Rob Kearney and illustrated by Nidhi Chanani. Through conversations, worksheets, and a read-aloud of the text, she tied the book into her classroom’s ongoing learning surrounding character traits.
Overall, Nicole reports that the program offered an incredibly positive experience for all involved students and educators. One teacher shared that their student related strongly to the representation of a family with two moms in My Parents Won’t Stop Talking by Emma Hunsinger and Tillie Walden; he “lit up” when he saw an illustration of the protagonist’s family and exclaimed, “Just like me!” Beyond providing important and necessary representation to children who may identify as LGBTQ+ or know and love someone in the LGBTQ+ community, many of PLP’s featured books, such as My Parents Won’t Stop Talking, beautifully portray families where queerness is incidental. What’s most important in Hunsinger and Walden’s book is that the main character’s parents won’t stop talking—not that they’re different from other families in any way. Nicole affirms the importance of making space for texts like these in classrooms, not just for kids who explicitly relate to the characters and their families, but for all children to learn about different types of people and family structures. “You might encounter people in the world who will be different from you—it shouldn’t be something that you find out about later in life,” she elaborates.
Nicole finds it especially meaningful to pave the way for more LGBTQ-inclusive books in the state where she grew up, attended school, and encountered little support for queer history and the queer community. She knows from personal experience how difficult it can be for children growing up in Georgia to come to terms with their sexuality and find representation in stories and books. “I just know what that feels like, and I want to provide such a different experience for kids today,” she says. “And having resources helps so much with that. Because it’s not just me up there talking . . . it’s about these characters, these people. It’s about families. It’s about the world.” In the current era of restrictive book bans and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, reading inclusive and diverse books is more important than ever. “It’s liberating, and it’s the type of work that I want to do,” Nicole said. “It feels good to have the freedom here to do that.”
Nicole comes out to her students by simultaneously teaching them about an important figure in LGBTQ+ history, so often ignored by school curricula—she reads the PLP-featured book Pride: The Story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag by Rob Sanders and illustrated by Steven Solerno (a gift from one of Nicole’s former students). The opportunity to teach the LGBTQ+ history that she did not learn in school has been incredibly empowering. “The whole point of teaching history, in my opinion,” she states, “is to do better now and moving forward. Kids need to know about what happened in our world, so that they can question, they can have information to build on, to vote, to make changes, to make a difference.”
The PLP in Action Pilot Program furthers PLP’s mission to diversify classrooms and to help plant the seeds of equality and inclusion by making sure all families, communities, and people are represented in classroom literature. Nicole sums up the deep impact of this work, explaining, “We want kids to learn and grow, but we also want to make the future generation better. It’s part of why I do what I do; it’s part of why I’m a teacher. Because things can always be better, and these are the future leaders of our world.”
