BALLOU HIGH SCHOOL

The Ballou Story Project Series
Frank W. Ballou High School is located in a low-resource, high-crime neighborhood of Ward 8, SE Washington, DC. Ballou doesn't (yet) have a newspaper or literary magazine, and all too often its narrative is shaped by stories told by outsiders. With the Ballou Story Project, we're happy to hand that mic to the students themselves. They tell stories that highlight the dedication, perseverance, heart, and joy of the community. Read these stories to meet educators, administrators, and fellow students working hard, overcoming, and believing in each other. Ballou is a real and necessary home for many students.
There’s no single event that made me an adult. It’s not ‘once upon a time I was kid, and then I was a teen and learned how to grow up.’ For me I skipped that step. I was a kid and then I wasn’t.
CURRENT BOOKS

See! This book right here demonstrates how a movement should be constructed. Instead of focusing on the negative people within a community who often times get the publicity for their actions, it's best to demonstrate to others, especially minorities and those of low economic status, that there are individuals out there who are trying their best to change their outcome. Our lives matter showed me, a fellow African, that there are kids in inner cities who are going against the status quo of doing or selling drugs, getting pregnant or just not caring about life. It was refreshing and sad to see that some of these teens had to grow up quickly because of their parents and their situations.
The common theme through “Our Lives Matter” is one of hope and determination. These teenagers refuse to be judged and pigeonholed, offering their stories to emphasize their differences, their commonalities, their dreams and their commitment to education and change. Through it all forms a thread of hope that the new generation will make the world a better place and fight the barriers that keep us separated.
–Louisiana Book News
Mini essays by a bunch of high school students about their hopes, dreams, aspirations, and pasts. Highly enjoyable read, and very timely too.
--John, goodreads reviewer and Indiefab award judge
Literally one hour after I had cataloged and displayed the book How to Grow up Like Me by The Ballou Story Project in our middle school library, it was seized upon by an 8th grade boy who is a reluctant reader, and to my knowledge, had only checked out one other book while in middle school. He made an instant connection with the honest and powerful stories written inside. This student ran down to show the book to his reading teacher and, according to her, he is absolutely captivated and now can’t wait to come to class to read the stories and hear the voices of these courageous authors. This is a great victory. Thank you for sharing this inspiring collection with our students. This is real. This is life-changing. -- Librarian, Hardy Middle School, Washington, DC
“I was so inspired by the powerful stories published by your students from Ballou! The narrative is so similar to my students here in Memphis and so many kids from urban school districts around the country. There is a need for a writing project like this in Memphis. Our students just don’t have as many opportunities as they should to express how they feel and to be listened to.” -- Teach for America Instructor, Memphis, TN
Recently, Ballou High School graduates and co-authors of How to Grow Up Like Me, Our Lives Matter, and Humans of Ballou, Carl Brown and Darne’sha Walker visited a class of 6th-8th graders at Kendall Demonstration Elementary School (KDES). KDES is a day school serving deaf and hard of hearing students from birth through grade 8 located within Gallaudet University’s campus.
Help us celebrate the new year by donating to our cause and helping meet our year-end fundraising goal.
This summer we also held writing workshops with 16 ambitious teens from the Latin American Youth Center’s Latino Youth Leadership Council. They wrote and illustrated true life stories of immigration, education, family, and community. For the past few months, a team of comic book professionals have been working hard to bring these powerful stories together into a bilingual graphic memoir collection not to be missed.
It was our busiest summer yet here at Shout Mouse Press! Help us celebrate these summer highlights and look forward to all to come this fall.
Recently, authors China, Amira, and Tyandra visited Excel Academy Public Charter School as part of the PEN/Faulkner Writers in Schools program. The writers shared from their co-authored book, “Our Lives Matter” with a class of thoughtful and insightful 8th graders. The students were so inspired by the story they decided to write their own stories in a similar style.
We’re turning three this summer! We’ve published 25 books and worked with over 200 young writers from 5 different non-profit partners. To celebrate, we are participating in 2017 United Way Do More 24 Campaign, the area's biggest 24-hour online fundraiser, on June 8 from 12:00 AM – 11:59 PM. You can make an advance donation starting May 25. All you have to do is log on at www.domore24.org/npos/shout-mouse-press and donate!
Ballou Story Project (BSP) took the stage for the first time a few weeks ago and we could not be more proud of the work of these young writers.The performance, directed and produced by our partners at Young Playwrights’ Theatre and featuring five talented professional actors, tenderly handled sensitive topics of abuse, cancer, and loss.
Did you hear the news? This year, 100 percent of Ballou High School’s senior class applied to college! We could not be more proud of the graduating class of 2017. Wow!
This winter has been a busy one! This is what we’ve been up to.
Here at Shout Mouse, we see Black History Month as an opportunity to look at the past and think about how and why history matters for the present and the future.
We’re thrilled to announce that thanks to a generous grant from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, we will be able expand and innovate the Ballou Story Project this year through a cool new partnership with Young Playwrights' Theater. We’re taking these stories to the stage! Stay tuned for updates about the performance this spring.
This month, Shout Mouse went on a book tour to Granville, Ohio. We were honored to be invited by Denison University to speak on campus as part of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program’s Laura C. Harris Symposium.
Here at Shout Mouse, we’re excited to celebrate September as National Literacy Month. Literacy is not only dear to our hearts, but central to our mission. To us, literacy is not only about ability to read, but also the capacity to love stories and to value one’s own voice. Find out our authors are encouraging literacy.
We’re going to Orlando, because that's where the important work of our authors is being celebrated. Their stories of dignity and empowerment and overcoming are the messages being touted, being shouted, from the stage. These are the values that drown out all the rest. We’re going to hold up their books as refutations, books that change the story--about who can make a difference, who can be a hero, who can sow love and hope and change against all odds--because changing the story is the first step in changing the heart.
Guess what we just learned? 3 Shout Mouse Press books have been named as FINALISTS for 4 awards in 2 categories in a nation-wide book contest for independent presses!
The best thing about getting our authors' stories out into the world is hearing about all the ways that their voices can be used to educate, activate, and open hearts and minds. Recently we sat down with the good folks at Turning the Page, a DC-based organization that works to improve public school education, and we discovered a brand new use for one of our books: as a training resource for new community educators.
You’ve heard about the incredible #1000blackgirlbooks campaign, right?
If not, here’s the scoop:
Marley Dias, age 11, decided she was sick of always reading about “white boys and dogs.” She asked, where are the characters who look like me? Those books about strong proud funny beautiful black girls were not showing up in her school curriculum, so she decided to do something about it: she started the #1000blackgirlbooks campaign.
On October 24, the authors of Shout Mouse took part in the second annual DC Public Library Author Fest. While we were selling books at our table, an excited Shout Mouse reader came up to meet our authors and share how she has already been using their words in her college classroom at the University of Maryland, College Park.
On Wednesday, August 12th, we had the incredible opportunity to meet leaders working with at-risk youth from all over the world and to share with them our books! Through a program called the IVLP which is run by the State Department, we met with folks from: Armenia, Australia, Bangladesh, Belize, Congo, Egypt, Haiti, Iraq, Jordan, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan, Palestine, the Philippines, Portugal, Sri Lanka, Trinidad and Tobago, and Ukraine.
In one night this past weekend, two young men from the communities served by Shout Mouse were shot and killed in senseless acts of violence...
I cannot help thinking of our authors when I hear this news, and of the weight of growing up in such a world where life is taken so carelessly outside your front door. I'm thinking about the psychic pain of not feeling safe at home. It sticks with me.
Woohoo! Shout Mouse books on national radio and Kojo Nnamdi's 2015 Summer Reading List!
Mark Hecker of Reach, Inc. knocked it out of the soundbooth today on The Kojo Nnamdi Show's Kids and YA Summer Reading program. He was an incredible ambassador not only for Reach's teen authors but also for the authors of Ballou Senior High School, and Beacon House.
"Buy this book," says poet/activist/educator Kyle Dargan. "Share it with other young people and use it as a tool to educate yourselves and initiate conversations with others."
We are grateful to Kyle for his incisive foreword, for his call to action on behalf of these authors, and most importantly for his commitment to voicing hard and necessary truths in the name of justice. Read his blog post and smart foreword below, and SHARE WITH EDUCATORS EVERYWHERE.
BOOK LAUNCH!
We did it! The authors of Ballou Senior High School launched their beautiful new book into the world: Our Lives Matter. Incredible day yesterday of readings, autographs, hugs, and lots and lots of applause. Thank you to everyone who made this happen and was there to cheer on these authors! And thank you most importantly to the authors themselves. We are so proud!
We started writing a week before the decision came down in Ferguson. We finished two days after protestors took to the streets in Baltimore.
Through the course of a historic year in our country's ongoing Civil Rights Movement, 30 students from Ballou Senior High School came together to add something powerful to the national conversation about race, inequality, violence, and justice.
On Tuesday, May 12, 2015, I was given an incredible opportunity: to meet President Obama and put our authors' stories in his hands.
WHAT?!! That's how I felt. Here's how it happened:
One of Miss Ramble's 8th grade reading students at Hardy Middle School in NW DC picked up Ballou Story Project's "How to Grow Up Like Me" from his school library and couldn't put it down. He showed his teacher and neither could she. Now he and his fellow students are reading, discussing, and responding to these memoirs for the rest of the school year. Says Miss Ramble, "They can't wait to come to class." They want to meet these authors. They have so many questions. They have so much to say.
We're not just shouting today at Shout Mouse, we're doing a little jig. Why, you ask? Because in partnership with the good folks at Reach, Inc. we just delivered nearly 1,000 Shout Mouse and Reach teen-authored books to DCPS Libraries, who want every one of our titles in every one of their schools.
Every Shout Mouse book in every public school in DC. !!!
One of the many delights was seeing our new authors meeting, so to speak, our already published authors from Reach Inc and Ballou High School: the girls loved reading the high-flying adventures from Reach and the bravely vulnerable essays from Ballou.
We are so proud of Dreonna Richardson, one of the essayists in How To Grow Up Like Me, who was featured in WAMU 88.5's series Beating the Odds, in which education reporter Kavitha Cardoza profiles students in the Washington, D.C. area who have overcome struggles and found ways to thrive academically and socially.
It's been a while since I was moved to tears at a reading, but on Thursday, May 29, 2014, three Ballou Story Project authors brought me there. These three writers--M.H. Jordan, Christopher Allen, and Gerald McBrayer--were being celebrated at the awards ceremony for the Global Harmony Through Personal Excellence essay competition, a citywide contest for DCPS students that called for essays about daily acts of courage.