By Lisa M. Echols

When Ann Rogers, Program Specialist for Ninth District Opportunity (NDO), got word that parents wanted more support to encourage reading at home, she reached out to the Hall County Library System to create a reading challenge that would impact more than 2,500 Head Start students in 25 Georgia counties!

Ninth District Opportunity is the nonprofit that manages Head Start and early Head Start centers around North Georgia, from Towns and Union Counties south to Cobb and Oconee County. Its preschool centers “promote school readiness by providing social, cognitive, and emotional development for low income children.” These amazing centers are free to attend and cover all aspects of education for kids and parents. 

Ms. Rogers envisioned a reading challenge similar to 1,000 Books Before Kindergarten, where classrooms across NDO could count both the reading they were doing at school as well as the reading families were completing at home and work toward reading goals in each classroom. Children and classrooms could earn prizes for meeting goals, and by incentivizing reading, families would feel supported in continuing their children’s literacy journey at home.

With input from NDO, Youth Services Director Lisa Echols developed 1,000 Books With Head Start, a Beanstack program that fit its needs for a multi-county, multi-center reading challenge. Each classroom would be encouraged to read 1,000 books throughout the year. Centers could create a “reader” account for each of their classrooms. Each month, the classrooms would track the books they read and also send home paper logs for parents to track reading efforts after school. At the end of the month, the center director would enter the reading totals into each classroom’s reader account. Classrooms could earn things like cupcake parties, and children could earn badges and books to keep forever, funded through Head Start grants and community partners. Families were also encouraged to join the 1,000 Books Before Kindergarten program at their local library for even more fun and prizes!

1,000 Books With Head Start premiered in January 2024. With only five months until the end of the school year, there was some concern that perhaps classrooms wouldn’t have enough time to reach their challenge goals. We wanted our challenge to be exciting and encouraging, not frustrating. We shouldn’t have worried. The Head Start centers and families embraced the challenge and ran with it. We were amazed to see that, by the end of the first month, they had already finished 75,000 books! By the end of May, every Head Start center and classroom reached their reading goal with a grand total of more than 285,000 books read throughout the 25 NDO counties.

Now that the work of developing the program has been tackled and our initial trial program found to be a shining success, NDO and the Hall County Library System are looking forward to starting the challenge again for the 2024-2025 school year and looking to break our previous records in reading for preschoolers! For more information about the Hall County Library System, check out our website at www.hallcountylibrary.org.