"Our efforts to improve student performance must be reading, to that end parents and other members of the community and our school district must work together. District One has embarked on a Read to Lead initiative with the belief that reading expands one's ability to write, compute, think, and articulate one's thoughts. Not only that, reading enlarges one's world, and challenges the vision of those who may not have had a vision. My belief is that we have students who are lexical geniuses, but they are all to frequently called inept in school, a label that often obliterates a part of the student's identity. Read to Lead seeks to encourage learning the rules of language appropriateness by showing students the similarities between the way they speak (the rap) and standard English (the map), so we can encourage them without 'dissin' (disrespecting) them."