With the help of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School’s media specialists, teacher assistants, peer counselors, and media techs have been putting together advertisements for the 2022-2023 school year Florida Teen Reads book program around the campus of MSD. They said their goal was to have everything complete and ready by Aug. 31, for the night of the open house, which they were able to complete.

“Bookflix,” Netflix but for books, includes FTR’s and more recommendations by media specialist Diana Haneski and Anders including new arrivals from the media center. The Florida Teen Reads program is receiving much love from students and staff of MSD.

“We want to grow our community of readers at MSD. Many students use streaming platforms, like Netflix, for movies and television shows,” media clerk Jean Anders said. “By presenting books in a familiar layout, we hope to encourage more students and staff to check out the variety of materials available in the media center.”

The FTR list is a student-choice reading award program that puts together an annual group of favorite reads according to teens around Florida. In the spring of each year, the fifteen titles are chosen by the committee of fourteen local librarians and in October, the committee reads through the selected list and chooses the book that will earn the Florida Teen Reads Award. To choose the award- winning book, the librarians first narrow the list of hundreds of books down to 75 titles. In the spring, the committee then chooses the list of 15 books, and then finally, chooses the most popular book amongst teens in Florida.

The Florida Teen Reads programs’ overall goal is to encourage teens to read. By creating the program, it entices teens to engage in reading books of their own interests. The program is directed for teens, grades 9 through 12, to read a wide-variety of books with many genres, viewpoints, ethnicities, reading levels, formats and cultural perspectives.

The Florida Teen Reads program has been making it their mission to help motivate teens to read ever since 1983. Some at MSD feel this effort has been largely successful because teens are more passionate about reading than before.

“We love to build the window to showcase our collection and what’s available in the media center. For example last year we had ‘get caught reading’ so we had students’ pictures in the window of them reading,” junior and media tech Maya Ramos said.

The MSD Book Club uses the list of the 15 Florida Teen Reads books every year in their “Battle of the Books” competition.”

Battle Of the Books is a tournament in which book clubs all across Broward County come together and have a competition on the Florida Teen Reads books. The competition requires all members of the different book clubs participating to read the 15 FTR books and at the competition, are read quotes from each book. Members then hold up a card of which FTR book they think the quote is from. Last year, the competition was held in MSD’s media center.

Students are able to visit and check out any of the new arrivals and FTRs currently in the media center with a pass from their teacher.