An English teacher in his 14th year, Christopher Leavens speaks fast and animated, with his eyes often growing wide when he’s talking about reading.
A good book, he says, as a matter of fact, can change a kid’s life. Just being a reader also helps improve writing and communication skills, he adds, his excitement building.
“Their sleep gets better, their stress level, their impulse control, their empathy, all these other things,” Leavens, 36, says. “If you could take what reading does to you and put it in a pill, it would be the fastest-selling pill in the world, because of all the benefits that can come from it.”
Christopher Leavens, an English language development teacher at Guadalupe Centers Middle School, laughs as he teaches a lesson on sentence structure to seventh grade students on Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025, in Kansas City. A good book, he says, can help change a student’s life. Tammy Ljungblad tljungblad@kcstar.com
Now picture for a second, when in 2022 Leavens joined the staff at Guadalupe Centers Middle School, in Kansas City, as an English Language Development teacher and learned there was no library or librarian. No shelves full of books for the kids to peruse and choose from.
After feeling like “something was missing,” inside the charter school where space is limited, Leavens — who teaches seventh grade sheltered English and focused language study — says he saw a challenge. And along with that an opportunity to slowly fill the need, an effort he says his principal and district embraced from the get-go.
What started with a small bookshelf inside his own room, has four years later grown to eight more “classroom libraries” inside the English Language Arts and English Language Development classes, and the momentum is only building. Rising test scores and increasing student buy-in show that Leavens’ idea and the school’s project, “Aztecs Read,” has changed things inside this charter school without a library.
Leavens has brought in authors to talk with the kids. Students have taken field trips to libraries and have earned rewards and prizes for independent reading.
“It is amazing to see how much the reading culture has shifted,” said Carolyn Duff, an English Language Development teacher for Guadalupe Centers Middle School. “Students have gone from I don’t do that, I don’t read books, to truly believing that they are readers and finding interest in it.”
Walking down the hall, she sees students “proudly” carrying the books they’ve checked out from their classrooms. If they have a little free time they pick up a book. And on the recent Thanksgiving break, many students clocked reading minutes each day through Beanstack, a digital platform and app that tracks time and promotes incentives and rewards for students who read.
In her own classroom, Duff’s students regularly check out books from the collection of Spanish titles she’s built since coming to the school.
“You can see the shift around the school,” said Duff, who applauds what Leavens started. “… It’s impressive and inspiring to see someone do something so big in an out-of-the box way.”
Nayeli, a seventh grade student, reads a classroom library book during class on Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025, at Guadalupe Centers Middle School, in Kansas City. Tammy Ljungblad tljungblad@kcstar.com ‘Needed to get creative’
This “shift” comes at a time when thousands of schools across the nation — a significant portion of those being charter schools — don’t have a designated library or librarian, according to recent studies and statistics.
The fear of continuing budget cuts only makes it more critical for schools to come up with ways to focus on literacy when there’s no physical space for a library or money for librarians.
The Guadalupe Centers district — which serves 1,600 students — has a library in its elementary school, but not in the middle or high schools.
“So we needed to get creative in the secondary level,” said Luis Posada, principal at the middle school. “That’s urban education. Sometimes space is a problem.”
In his classroom, Christopher Leavens, an English language development teacher at Guadalupe Centers Middle School, talks to Jose, a seventh grade student, as he teaches a lesson on Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025, in Kansas City. Leavens said “something was missing” from the school without a library — so he’s bringing in more and more books. Tammy Ljungblad tljungblad@kcstar.com
Just look at Leavens’ own classroom library, says Posada, as he points to the wheels at the bottom of two large metal shelves that hold the teacher’s library of books.
“Notice, even the shelves are like moving shelves, because sometimes, due to growing pains, we have to move classrooms,” said Posada about a school with a waiting list of 300 to 600 students. “So then, how do you take your library with you?”
The principal says he can see the difference the focus on reading and literacy is making — from seeing “the pride” students have, to knowing they are enjoying and comprehending what they are reading.
“We’re a small school, so everybody knows each other.,” Posada said. “Kids see each other carrying a book and that also creates a ripple effect. … The other piece, too, is our test scores are speaking loud as well.”
In the 2022-2023 school year, students made progress on the NWEA reading test, which measures a student’s level of reading comprehension, improving an average of 3.69 RIT (Raish Unit) points. In the 2024-2025 school year, two years into implementing “Aztecs Read,” students improved by an average of 6.17 RIT points, nearly double the growth from two years before.
Christopher Leavens, an English language development teacher at Guadalupe Centers Middle School, talks with Nancy, a seventh grade student during class on Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025, in Kansas City. Tammy Ljungblad tljungblad@kcstar.com
The next hope is to have more books accessible across all classes, such as social studies. The ultimate goal is to have the students at the school have similar access to great reading as their peers across the city, Leavens said.
“I think it was Cherry (character Sherri Valance whose nickname was Cherry) in “The Outsiders” who told Pony Boy that, you know, the sunset looks the same on our side of the tracks as well,” Leavens said, referring to S.E. Hinton’s coming-of-age novel about rival teen gangs divided by their socioeconomic status.
“So as an English teacher, I think that it’s just imperative that we give our kids that opportunity to be able to read books,” Leavens said. “To have choices over the books that they read, celebrate them for the reading that they do and build up a community of readers here.”
‘A momentum builder’
The mission in the beginning was simple: Get books in the hands of the kids.
“I remember saying that over and over again our first year,” Leavens said as he recited those eight words. Twice.
In the fall of 2022, he asked school leaders for money to buy books, to create a small library of sorts for his students. Then when Posada came to the school several months later Leavens asked for money to fund small “libraries” for other classrooms.
“He already had a plan in place with a budget number,” Posada said. “So then it was easier to see how we can work things out. But the idea was to get books in kids’ hands, and we did that through different formats.
“But it was always a great idea, because we know we need to help students go from learning to read to reading to learn.”
“You can see the shift around the school,” said Carolyn Duff, an English Language Development teacher for Guadalupe Centers Middle School, about the ongoing push to bring more books into the KC charter school. Tammy Ljungblad tljungblad@kcstar.com
Duff taught at East High School, which is part of the Kansas City Public Schools system, before coming to Guadalupe Centers Middle School four years ago. At East, she said, there’s a “huge library” and a librarian who helps students and teachers.
“So that was a big change for me,” Duff said. “Our kids, you know, come from the same district boundaries. So it just felt like a really big access issue, an equity issue, to not have a library.”
As an English language development teacher, who could always take her students to a library to find books, she didn’t have a personal collection of titles. She soon saw Leavens ask for money to begin a small “library” in his classroom.
“It definitely was a momentum builder,” said Duff, sitting in her small and cozy classroom next to Leavens’ room. “It is amazing what one person asking a single question will do for the group. Because other people realized, ‘Oh, wow, like, I can ask for the same thing, and the answer might be yes.’”
In 2023, the Guadalupe Centers school district gave the middle school $10,000 to buy books that created more “classroom libraries.” The support from the school and district continues.
“The goal is to support a culture of reading,” said Dean of Students Jacey Shoffner. “The teachers and the families and the system have to support that in order for the kids to really want to do it. So I think everybody’s on board and making it happen.”
Added Duff: “The classroom library is really just been the start of surrounding students and honoring who they are and making sure to provide them equal access to things that I think are so normal in other schools.”
The school now has around 3,000 books for the student body of 350, which breaks down to about nine books per student, Leavens said. Estimates vary on the minimum number of books a library should have. Some experts say it should be at least 10-12 books per student while other estimates say a minimum of 20 books per student.
Members of the community can help the school build their “libraries” by purchasing Book Bucks at Rainy Day Books in Fairway. Teachers then can use those to buy sought-after titles and genres. A link to purchase those buck for Guadalupe Centers Middle School is here.
At the end of each school year, teachers ask students what kind of books they want to see in the classroom libraries.
“They always want horror,” Leavens says, smiling. “They love being scared. They always are telling me about horror movies that they’ve seen that I would not even go near.”
A classroom library book sits on a desk of a seventh-grader during class at Guadalupe Centers Middle School on Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025, in Kansas City. The school does not have a library and Christopher Leavens, an English language development teacher, has started a small library in his classroom for the students to have access to more books. Tammy Ljungblad tljungblad@kcstar.com
Students also lean toward graphic novels. And books about sports and ones “that kind of reflect their lived experience, that reflect their identity.”
“Real readers, they pick what they want to read,” he says. “Kids need to learn how to choose.”
‘On fire for reading’
Leavens himself wasn’t a big reader as a young kid, despite the fact that his parents were. Then, for “no reason at all,” he picked up a copy of “Friday Night Lights” by H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger.
From that one book, he said, “I was on fire for reading.”
“That’s an experience I really want to bring to our kids,” he said. “It can be incredibly powerful when a kid finds his book, when they find that book that they just have that experience where it’s like, ‘Oh, this is fun.’”
Teachers are seeing those moments. Leavens talks about the reaction of one of his students when she got her own copy of the new “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” book — “she hugged it.”
Then in October, Duff had a new student in her class. The eighth grader had only been there a couple of days when for the first time the school hosted a book fair, sponsored by Rainy Day Books in Fairway.
The new student resisted even looking at the books, she said.
“He said to me, ‘Why would I need that? That has nothing to do with my life. I never need to read a book,’” Duff said, recalling their conversation. “He hadn’t had the literary experience of just that being your normal everyday routine of reading with your parents growing up, or just hadn’t had this.”
The student’s world, Duff said, “was really narrow in the sense that he couldn’t see what a book could do for him.”
But over the Thanksgiving break, during the reading challenge, the student participated and read a Spanish graphic novel. He logged his time into Beanstack, which teachers say has been a big part of the reading success at the school.
“He read for 10 minutes every day,” Duff said, a smile crossing her face. “It reflects that he has found enjoyment in something new, and he’s connecting with his home language. Hopefully (he’ll) make connections with others in school that way.”
In his classroom, Christopher Leavens, an English language development teacher at Guadalupe Centers Middle School, talks about the benefits students get from reading books, on Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025, in Kansas City. Tammy Ljungblad tljungblad@kcstar.com
Again, it goes back to the bevy of benefits that Leavens says reading can bring to kids.
Growing up, Leavens said he had reading role models and bookshelves in every room of the family’s home. He said he knows “not all of our kids have that.”
“And so I think that it’s our responsibility as a school to be that hub,” Leavens said. “To be that resource for those kids who might not go to Barnes and Noble or Rainy Day Books or the library all the time.
“We can be that for them.”
This story was originally published December 13, 2025 at 6:00 AM.
The Kansas City Star
Laura Bauer, who came to The Kansas City Star in 2005, focuses on investigative and watchdog journalism. In her 30-year career, Laura has won numerous national awards for coverage of human trafficking, child welfare, crime and government secrecy.