Hart County Celebrates Literacy Through Imagination Library

Hart County is celebrating Literacy Day all month by promoting its Dolly Parton Imagination Library.

At their regular meeting last week, the Hart County Board of Commissioners heard from Tony Haynie with the Hart County Chapter of the Imagination Library.

Haynie asked the board to declare the entire month of September Imagination Library Month.

According to Haynie, research shows literacy is directly connected to the success of students.

“75% of poor readers in the third grade will never catch up in high school,”Haynie said. “By the fourth grade if you’re a poor reader, you have a four times higher chance of being a drop-out. 61% of low-income families in the U.S. don’t have a single piece of age-appropriate reading material for a child in the house.”

Haynie went on to say not being able to read also affects those students throughout their lives.

“Over 70% of inmates in America’s prisons can’t read above a fourth-grade level,” Haynie said. “So people in the U.S. who are illiterate represent 75% of the unemployed, 33% of mothers receiving aid, 85% of juveniles who appear in court and 60% of prison inmates.”

In 1995, Dolly Parton launched the Imagination Library to benefit the children of her home county in East Tennessee, USA.

Dolly’s vision was to foster a love of reading among her county’s preschool children and their families by providing them with the gift of a specially selected book each month.

By mailing high quality, age-appropriate books directly to their homes, she wanted children to be excited about books and to feel the magic that books can create.

Moreover, she could insure that every child would have books, regardless of their family’s income.

That vision eventually spread nationwide and later internationally.

Hart County has participated in the Imagination Library for the past 12 years and the group recently concluded a study on how successful the program has been locally.

“In Hart County, children that are in the program score between 8%-15% higher on their kindergarten readiness test. The earlier a child is in the program, the higher the score. We know that through our surveys, parents of children in the program read aloud to their children much more frequently than parents who don’t have a child in the program.”

Haynie says they currently have over 1,000 Hart County preschoolers enrolled in the Imagination Library.

The program is free and all of the books are also free.

Anyone interested in taking advantage of the Imagination Library for their child can contact the Hart County Chapter at 706=376-7449.