One of the goals of our community impact program, Partners In Early Childhood Education (PIECE), is to increase parental engagement in families with children aged 0-5. One way this happens is by giving reading kits to children ages 1-5 at Salina’s free summer lunch program hosted by USD 305. Piggy-backing on this idea, SAUW wanted to ensure school-age children have opportunities to read and grow during the summer, thus helping to ensure the “summer slide” isn’t so steep. This winter, Executive Director Amanda Michaelis met with USD 305 Superintendent Bill Hall and several Principals and literacy coaches who were interested in running a school-age literacy kit pilot program. Once a few schools got on board, Amanda approached local businesses that have expressed interest in providing meaningful service opportunities to their employees. Several employers then agreed to allow employees to volunteer during work hours to help assemble the literacy kits. With this collaborative approach, many community organizations are coming together to benefit both school-aged children and those entering Kindergarten the coming school year.
Here’s a basic breakdown of how the program works:
1. A school’s literacy coach decides which curriculum to cover, picks books and activities, and gathers all the necessary materials to have one literacy kit for every incoming Kindergartener.
2. The unassembled elements of the literacy kits are given to SAUW, who then delivers a portion of each kit to a partnering business who will have employees cut, sort, package, and otherwise assemble part of the literacy kit.
3. The literacy kits are picked up by SAUW and fully assembled together by one more business.
4. The assembled literacy kits are given back to the school to be handed out at Kindergarten round-up.
Pretty neat, right?
So far Schilling and Sunset Elementary Schools are piloting the literacy kit program for the 2014-2015 school year. Their literacy kits were assembled in late March by employees from Capitol Federal, Central National Bank, Philips Lighting, Simmons First National Bank, and Target. Bryan Herwig, Human Resources Generalist at Philips Lighting, said Philips runs an employee volunteer program called “Philips Cares” where employees can volunteer time and keep track of it with the company. Herwig had about 6 employees spend time assembling the literacy kits, which took roughly 6 minutes each to assemble. He said employees were able to take a break during a long shift and come into a conference room where the parts were laid out to be assembled. The convenience of having the kits assembled on site was a very big factor when Herwig agreed to take on the project with SAUW.
The benefit to having local businesses take part is that they can run an “Enhanced Workforce Campaign” during campaign season, which is just like a normal workplace campaign with the added factor of the workplace going above and beyond to serve the community, doing something such as volunteering to assemble literacy kits.
In the future, SAUW envisions volunteers coming to Kindergarten round-up and distributing the literacy kits, and reading to the children. By having volunteers model the behavior for parents, they will be more likely to use the literacy kits with their children during the summer. The next steps would be to have
every school in the Salina area on board with summer literacy kit programs, and then to have literacy
kits available for all Elementary school grades during the free summer lunch program.
Reading at an early age matters. The sooner kids start to make literary connections in their brains the
better prepared they will be each day, and the more likely they will be reading at or above grade level.
The combined High School graduation rate for Salina South and Salina Central is 87%. Research shows
that appropriate early childhood education and literacy is just the first step in the journey toward high
school graduation. By making it just this much easier for families to get their hands on a book and an
engaging activity we are moving one step closer for those children.