Dolly Parton Imagination Library brings books to young children

A recent Houston Chronicle front page headline stated “HISD students falling behind” with the important subtitle “Diminished reading skills could create domino effect.”
 
As a former tutor, teacher, principal, school board president and longtime supporter of childhood reading programs, I want you to know poor reading skills absolutely do create a domino effect, especially in single-parent households.
 
There is an old saying amongst elementary school teachers, “from 1st grade to 3rd grade, you learn to read and from 4th grade up, you read to learn.”

Children who can’t read proficiently by the third grade are more likely to not graduate from high school, have poor self-esteem, earn less, be on welfare, have unplanned pregnancies and commit crimes. If they come from households below the poverty line these outcomes are typically worse, statistics show.
 
Kindergarten teachers struggle with many children from low-income households, who start behind by not knowing their ABC’s and only having half the vocabulary (2,900 words vs. 5,800 words) of the other students in their class.
 
One helpful tip is to tell your readers about the award-winning Dolly Parton Imagination Library. 
 
Dolly’s program mails – for free – an age-appropriate book every month to any child applying from birth to age 5.  All books are selected by early childhood experts.  To date, she has gifted 197,460,315 books to 2,250,445 kids.
 
Just as there are food deserts in poorer communities, there are book deserts too. The ratio of age-appropriate books available to children in poorer households is far less than in other households.
 
Dolly says “You can never get enough books into the hands of enough children.”
 
Jeff Bezos recently donated $100 million to Dolly for her charities.  He is the founder of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post where columnists are sometimes featured in this paper.
 
Please spread the news about this wonderful free book program.  I am sure “thumbs” would approve in next Saturday’s opinion page.