DENVER — For many students at Denver Public Schools, Spanish is their primary language — and the district is making sure its libraries reflect that.
Claudia Marquez works in the library at Florida Pitt-Waller School near Green Valley Ranch, where she sees firsthand how much language and culture matter to young readers.
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"I love engaging with kids. I love to be able to talk to them. They open a lot when it comes to stories, how we can connect the stories, how we can connect to our past," Marquez said.
For Marquez, that connection is personal. She grew up in Denver Public Schools without access to Spanish-language books.
"That's why when I started this role, my main goal was to have not only Spanish, but other languages as well, for them to have that opportunity that I didn't have growing up," Marquez said.
On Friday, students at Florida Pitt-Waller got that opportunity, selecting Spanish-language picture books from their school library.
Pete Fey, Library Services Coordinator for Denver Public Schools, has spent each of the past 2 years traveling to Mexico to source books for DPS students at the largest Spanish-language book fair in the world.
"Everybody deserves to be able to walk into their school library and see something that speaks to their culture, that speaks to where they came from, that maybe is something that they would see in their home," Fey said.
The fair, held in Guadalajara, is often the only place Fey can find the specific titles DPS students need — and many cannot be found online at the scale the district requires.
"We just have to literally go to Guadalajara to get those books because we can't get all of the authentic Spanish picture books. We can't get translations of Pokémon manga here that we want to purchase for our students," Fey said.
Fey also made it a priority to find books that resonate with a growing segment of the DPS student population.
"We have a lot of students who recently have moved to Denver from Venezuela, who have family from Venezuela, who are connected to Venezuela… I was able to buy a bunch of the classic Venezuelan children's books — books that maybe they haven't seen before, but that their parents have seen before, their grandparents have seen before," Fey said.
For Marquez, the impact of those books goes beyond the page.
"We can be reading the same story, but we connect to our background, so it looks different in every one of us," Marquez said.
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