Secret donor gives the gift of reading
By Phyllis Moore
Published in News on March 19, 2018 5:50 AM
Full Size
News-Argus/CASEY MOZINGO
Delores Gray, right of center, leads a group of 4- and 5-year-olds in a song and dance while she visits Teresa Richardson's preschool at Little Buck Swamp Academy Thursday. Gray, a former music teacher, likes to use song in addition to story time to teach children.
Full Size
News-Argus/CASEY MOZINGO
Delores Gray reads a book called "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom" to a group of 4- and 5-year-olds at Little Buck Swamp Academy as part of the Raising a Reader program. Each week children go home with a bag that contains four books that they trade out the following week.
Full Size
News-Argus/CASEY MOZINGO
Children check out their Raising a Reader bag that is numbered each week. They carry the bag with four books home and get a different bag the following week. A master list prevents children from taking the same books home more than once.
The United Way of Wayne County is committing more than $590,000 from an anonymous donation to launch a family literacy program where it is needed most -- in the southern portion of the county.
Organizers behind the push cite a lack of reading support for young children and their parents.
"This issue is big and it will take many hands wrapped around this in order for us to have an impact," said Donna Phillips, librarian at Wayne County Public Library.
"We're dreaming and we're having to dream quickly."
The program will bring United Way together with local educators, health care professionals, law enforcement, industry and local government to develop a pilot program focused on children from birth to 3 years old. The goal will be to improve third-grade reading scores and to bolster future workforce development.
"As we shift and more focus is on community impact, that's really what our work is," said Steve Parr, executive director of the local United Way.
Read Wayne is one of the initiatives formed a couple of years ago to address early childhood literacy. The county library took the lead on that effort, visiting public housing communities and locations where mothers and small children might be to address some of the disparities between families and access to resources.
Another popular program has been Raising A Reader, targeting child care centers around the community that have 3-star ratings or less.
"We're working with parents, doing training for parents, providing high-quality, early-learning literacy experiences in the classroom. And every Friday, the children get a bookbag of books that go home with them with the goal of their parent reading to them over the weekend," Phillips said.
What program administrators saw almost immediately was that the children's enthusiasm for books transferred to the parents.
"So now they're coming back and children are jumping up and down and talking about, 'Mom read this book to me,' 'Daddy read this book to me,' and talking about their weekend experiences," she explained.
The Read Wayne initiative, started in 2016 with $50,000 in United Way money to be used over three years, was never intended to stay housed at the library, Phillips said. The goal was always to become a countywide effort.
What spurred the United Way to focus more on early learning were some of the statistics in Wayne County education, Parr said -- specifically that only 46 percent of third-grade students read proficiently by end of grade.
"That is a key, that if kids are reading proficiently at the end of third grade, they're more likely to succeed academically, graduate and move on," he said.
Looking beyond third-grade reading proficiency, Parr said the greater goal of the program is geared toward workforce development.
The short-term effect of the program may be on those third-graders, he said, but the big picture can impact everything from crime and law enforcement to the generation's ability to work and function in society. In the meantime, the greatest need for literacy improvements is in those pockets of the county most afflicted by poverty, he said.
"In the Dudley area, for example, there are pockets of poverty but no services. So our thoughts turned to that area of the county," Parr said.
"We know that this has to be comprehensive in nature, because if you're not bringing the family along while you're working with the children, then the impact's not going to be lasting."
Phillips has her own mental picture of what a family literacy center will look like. A similar model exists in Guilford County, to which she and others traveled to see firsthand.
"We had an opportunity to see in action where parents are learning on-site while their children are simultaneously learning in an early childhood classroom. And then there are opportunities in the day for parents and children to come together for what's called PACT Time -- parents and children together," she said.
Parr hopes to move expeditiously on the project, recognizing that there is no time to waste.
"United Way is committed and we committed to our donor, who did not want it to go up on a shelf," he said of the project.
"That's really what drove our board to saying, 'Let's have something with lasting impact.'"