Long was on hand this summer as the Troy-based Kids Read Now celebrated a decade of books sent every summer to elementary school students. Past and current Vandalia schools administrators and staff attended the celebration as a 10-year participant in the program.
Kids Read Now is a nonprofit organization started by Troy’s Leib Lurie and Barbara Lurie, who donated seed money from their commercial business, One Call Now, to start the reading program for children.
The program is designed to encourage ongoing reading and promote a mission to eliminate the summer slide in reading skills.
The program’s first year served about 1,000 kids, with 8,000 books sent to homes. This year, around 100,000 kids are participants with nearly a million books scheduled for distribution.
Leib Lurie said Kids Read Now has caught the attention of educators in 37 states. Efforts are being made to donate books for students in the Uvalde, Texas, schools following the deaths of students and teachers in a May mass shooting.
School districts that choose to participate in the reading program pay $45 per student involved.
The program begins with a wish list compiled by the program staff, with 160 books available. The list is color-coded by grade level so the teacher can direct the student to the appropriate level of books for their summer reading. The child then picks the books and the teacher helps them enter the selections into the computer.
When summer arrives, the children will receive a book weekly for eight weeks and an opportunity in the ninth week to write their own story when provided a booklet with a picture and instructions to write about what is happening in the picture.
The parents are contacted weekly to remind them to check the books read and to read with their child.
“They (children) pick the books, we engage them every week, have activities to do with mom and dad and they get prizes when they do it. It is win, win, win across the board,” Lurie said.
“When kids pick books, they are three times more likely to read them than when someone hands them a random book. When they show up in the mail with the kid’s name on it, they are going to read the book,” Lurie said.
Jennifer Strehle, a third-grade teacher at Demmitt, likes what she has seen of the Kids Read Now program.
“These books give students a chance to not only practice their reading skills but escape to new places they can imagine as they read. Students come back after summer break excited to share what they read about, and some students even bring their books to school to let their classmates read,” Strehle said.
For more information on Kids Read Now, visit www.KidsReadNow.org.
Contact this contributing writer at nancykburr@aol.com
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