Ironically, a career day project as a 7th grader at Winman Junior High School and frustration in her search for a job during the pandemic appear to have put Mikayla Rogers on track to a dual career.

A physical therapist living in Philadelphia, Rogers remembers the assignment to write about what inspired her at the school career day. She evens recalls – maybe not exactly word for word – the first lines to her submission put to poetry: “I want to be a nurse but I have to learn things first.”

Rogers never got back her poem, which also has a lot to do with why she has published a children’s book, has written a second book and has the vision for a “library” of children’s books.

“She never gave it back. I was baffled and honored she wanted to keep it,” Rogers said of retired Winman Principal Joanne McInerney.

It was McInnery who informed the Warwick Beacon of Rogers’ debut as an author and the fact that she has bought 15 of the books, Bailey’s Butterfly Socks, to be distributed to Warwick’s elementary school libraries, but this is getting ahead of Rogers’ story.

From an early age through kindergarten, Rogers attended Crayons, the day care and pre-school at the Trudeau Memorial Center. Because handicapped kids made up a good percentage of Crayons, Rogers noticed how special needs students were segregated once she went on to Warwick Public Schools. She realizes now that she never thought of her handicapped peers at Crayons as being different. They were her comrades.

From Cedar Hill, Rogers went on to Winman and then Toll Gate where she graduated in 2014. From Toll Gate, Rogers attended Springfield College where she majored in health science and pre-physical therapy. After graduation, Rogers stayed on at Springfield for another two years to become a certified physical therapist.

Then, like the rest of us, Rogers hit a rough patch – a worldwide pandemic. She had moved to Philadelphia to live with her fiancé and desperately searched for a job in her chosen profession.

“I kept applying for jobs and there was nothing,” she said. Frustrated and anxious to do something, Rogers revisited an idea she had for a story of a girl with cerebral palsy faced with attending her first day at school and fearful of being rejected by her classmates because of the leg braces she depends upon. Her father suggests she tell classmates they are butterfly socks. Indeed, on the first day a boy who is self-conscious because of his glasses asks her about the braces. She makes her first friend.

The message Rogers looks to get across to her young readers is “that everyone has something beautiful.”

Rogers said she wrote the book in two sittings. She connected with Fulton Books that arranged for an illustrator who corresponded with her by email. They have yet to meet.

Rogers self published her book.

Her second book that targets young readers four to eight years old is aimed at “anyone going into something new in young life.”

Rogers says she’s “not a big reader,” but as a child always loved it when her parents read to her.

Now with the thought of a library of books, Rogers is focused on “normalizing” medical instruments and reducing the fear and anxiety their clinical names could evoke. As an example she cites the helmet used to shape the heads of young children, branded as the “happy cap…and not something to be afraid of.” Braces, feeding tubes and other medical devices she suggests could be normalized through storytelling and nicknaming. She has enlisted the help of her sister, Becky Shea, an occupational therapist assistant, to come up with the list of medical devices.

Rogers said she has not seen McInerney “Mrs. Mac” for years, but always remembers her as caring for her students. McInerney and Rogers’ mother, Rosalind, are close friends so the families stay in touch. Instead of a card, Rogers said she mailed Mrs. Mac one of her books this Christmas, thus setting off the chain reaction that had McInnery contacting the Beacon.