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WELCOME and STUDENT PERFORMANCE
Board Chairman Tyler Murphy welcomed members of the public attending the meeting at the John D. Price Administration Building, located at 450 Park Place, as well as those watching the board meeting online.
The meeting also featured a poetry reading by Kiitan Adedeji, a freshman at Lafayette High School, who was recently named Lexington’s first Kentucky Youth Poet Laureate, one of the highest honors a poet can receive. Kiitan’s interest in creative writing was sparked in the FCPS elementary gifted and talented program as her teachers encouraged and nurtured her love of telling stories. Her passion for creatively communicating with the world ultimately led her to become a literary arts major at the School for Creating and Performing Arts at Lafayette High School, where she is also a member of the pre-engineering program.
Kiitan performed one of her original poems entitled “The Cage.”
The Cage
To them,
my hair had grown out
off the top of my head
and used its tight coils
to build a cage around me.
Making an exotic animal
kept in a cage
thousands of miles away from its home.
They reach into the depths of my cage
to touch my coils
for a feel of my exoticness.
I had never built my cage
only living in it.
Unable to muster the courage
to move the image away from their minds
I’d let them examine me as a specimen
I was exotic,
because every time I looked outside of my cage
I saw carbon copies
pale people looking at me, mouth agape
as I let them claw through my fur
tarnishing myself with it
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