DAYLO Honored with a SCLA Intellectual Freedom Award

DAYLO with Jonathan Haupt (left) at YALL Fest

Founded in 2021, DAYLO, or Diversity Awareness Youth Literacy Organization, is a student-led book club and community literacy service group fostering empathy and understanding through the power of story, with a growing number of chapters across South Carolina, including five chapters in Beaufort County.

DAYLO was recently awarded an honorable mention for the South Carolina Library Association’s 2024 Intellectual Freedom Award. Presented at the SCLA’s statewide conference in Columbia, the Intellectual Freedom Award recognizes those in the library services and advocacy community who have contributed to an awareness of intellectual freedom and censorship issues in South Carolina libraries—on the local, state, or national level.

The student leaders and advisors of DAYLO, and their mentors Claire Bennett and Jonathan Haupt, are honored to be commended by the SCLA with this honorable mention—and all the more so in a year in which the Intellectual Freedom Award was presented to past South Carolina Association of School Librarians (SCASL) president Tamara Cox.

Earlier this year, DAYLO was also recognized with a national commendation from the American Association of School Librarians at the recommendation of the SCASL and presented by Tamara Cox at the statewide SCASL conference. The South Carolina Education Association (SCEA) also awarded DAYLO their Richard W. Riley Award for Human & Civil Rights at their statewide awards dinner.

DAYLO was first established at Beaufort High in 2021 by Holland Perryman, then a high school junior, inspired by literary and social justice community programs she experienced as an intern of the nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center.

During the 2022-2023 school year, six DAYLO students from Beaufort High, Beaufort Academy, and Battery Creek High spoke out in public comments at Beaufort County School Board meetings in response to challenges against 97 books in district school libraries. Earlier this year, five DAYLO students from Beaufort High, Beaufort Academy, USC Beaufort, and Charleston’s Academic Magnet High School also spoke publicly against statewide restrictions impacting the freedom to read, as documented in a nationally broadcast segment for Nick News.The inspiring advocacy of DAYLO students has led to additional opportunities regionally and nationally, and has empowered the creation of new DAYLO chapters across South Carolina.

DAYLO’s student-led pro-literacy efforts have also been profiled nationally in the feature-length documentary film Banned Together, and in Education Week, Book Riot, Publishers Weekly,and School Library Journal, in addition to front-page news stories in the Charleston Post and Courier and The Island News.

DAYLO students have spoken at the annual conferences of the American Library Association, South Carolina Association of School Librarians, South Carolina Council of the Teachers of English, and Palmetto State Literacy Association, as well as in virtual events hosted by the American Library Association, PEN America, the Children’s Book Council, the Right to Read Network of the National Coalition Against Censorship, EveryLibrary’s Library Advocacy and Funding Conference, and as keynote presenters at the 12th annual Dufford Diversity and Inclusion Week at Newberry College.

In addition to being on-campus book clubs, current DAYLO student leaders and members enhance community literacy efforts through community read-alouds at the Port Royal Farmers Market on first Saturdays, by stocking dozens of little free libraries across our communities with inclusive books for all ages, by decorating and donating little library book boxes for local laundromats and a food pantry, by facilitating the annual Beaufort Human Library, and by collaborating with the Conroy Center to host local and visiting authors at public events like the Lowcountry Children’s Book Fair, Lowcountry Book Club Convention, March Forth, and the Pat Conroy Literary Festival.

To learn more about DAYLO’s pro-literacy community service outreach and continued advocacy for the right to read freely, please follow DAYLO on Instagram at www.instagram.com/daylo_reads or Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/DAYLO.reads.