Skylar Kessler and her mom are in the middle of a race.

The prize is finishing the Harry Potter series first. Skylar, who will turn twelve in ten days, is a sixth grader at Central Middle School who reads comics, graphic novels, novels, and novellas — whatever she can reach. She came into this year already mid-series and racing.

That detail says something about how reading works in her house, and about how it has shaped the student she's become.

"My mom would read to me every night," Skylar said. "As I got a little older, I would start reading with her — she would read this part, I would read that part." Those evenings grew into something larger: encyclopedias, dictionaries, a hunger for words, a love of drawing, and eventually the desire to write stories of her own. She's currently fourteen pages into one. She recently decided to restart it after changing the point of view structure — a revision decision most adults would find daunting. Skylar is not deterred.

Her father, she explains, is more left-brain — someone who sees the world "almost as numbers instead of really, like, patterns and pictures." Her mother is more right-brain: reading, painting, imagination. Skylar has inherited pieces of both, and she's been paying close attention to the difference. She wants to study neuroscience. She's already thought through why neurology takes too many years and why neurosurgery isn't right for her either — she read a book about surgical thinking, about how surgeons learn to set everything else aside the moment they pick up a scalpel.

"I don't feel like I could do that," she said. "My brain's a bit too hyperactive."

She has already narrowed her college geography to somewhere in North Carolina, Georgia, or Tennessee, wherever a good enough scholarship takes her.

This is a sixth grader.

At Central Middle, Skylar takes seventh-grade advanced ELA — heading upstairs to the eighth-grade area for class. In the Student of the Year competition last year, she finished tied for second. Her senior sister, Naiya, was in the running for Student of the Year at the high school level. Tomorrow night, Skylar will watch Naya walk across the graduation stage and, she says, will most likely shout and holler accordingly.

Beyond academics, Skylar has been building something of a media presence since third grade, when she served as MC for a school event and was still getting recognized for it two years later in fifth grade.

The larger project is the Wildcat Readers are Leaders Vodcast — a program she proposed herself in fifth grade at Central Intermediate after her teacher, Ms. Barker, encouraged students to think of new ideas. Skylar asked if they could do something like a radio show. Ms. Barker told her it was a great idea and that maybe she could host it. She has been hosting it for a year.

The vodcast — a video podcast, Skylar clarifies, because you can see the speaker's mouth moving — is built around getting students interested in reading and the library. She interviews students about their favorite books, covers a word of the month tied to the district's Capturing Kids' Hearts character program, and recently featured the winners of the Battle of the Books competition. The goal is to make the library feel like somewhere worth belonging.

"Most kids want to be a library leader," she said. "Which will probably make them want to read."

At the district level, Skylar appears in Heart of Central, the weekly video series covering life across the school system, hosting a segment called Meet the Admin — interviews with school administrators designed to make the adults in charge feel a little more human and a little less intimidating. She writes the questions herself, mixing serious ones with playful ones: What's your favorite animated movie? Who is your favorite staff member? She develops most of them on the spot.

"It's kind of easy for me to think of, like," she said, the sentence trailing off in the unbothered way of someone for whom this particular challenge has never actually been a challenge.

When asked in last year's academic competition to name the two most important subjects, she chose reading and writing. Her reasoning moved quickly from word problems in math to claim-evidence-reasoning in science to what happens when nobody can read the founding documents.

"History would repeat itself," she said, "if nobody could even read — like, the Declaration of Independence."

She said it like it was obvious.

Because to her, it is.