HCHS Looks to High-Interest Literacy Options Thanks to Recent Grant

It has been months of waiting, but Hart County High School Assistant Principal Tracey Stewart finally received word this month her school was chosen out of an application field of thousands of entries to be awarded funding to expand literacy promotion.

Through the Dollar General Literacy Foundation youth grant, Stewart and the high school will receive $2,000 to assist in growing the selection of books offered to students, taking into account the popularity of the pieces, and veering away from traditional literacy options as well as traditional style of reading projects.

Anna Hall is the Community Relations Director for REACH the Hart Community Education Foundation.

Hall says they plan to use the money to buy more books that are of a higher interest for book clubs and to give students a selection of books they are more likely to select.

“Literacy is one of our main goals in our new charter, and this is just another extension to increase literacy and excitement about reading, especially with the older students by steering away from traditional books into a sort of new realm, going with the more popular books,” Hall explained. “We hope it will help them be more interested in books.”

Labeled as the Read with Hart initiative, the project will empower the high school’s 990 students and be a tool to ignite a love of reading in peer-to-peer promotional projects, such as Digital Book Teasers, which is a scrolling student-designed system projected in high-traffic areas .

While there will always be a place for traditional, classic works in the classroom and in book-based organizations at the school, Stewart is hoping to stock shelves with additional popular, current options so students have an even more diverse range of reading material.

“The classics like ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and pieces such as that will always be used with our students, but with newer, more non-traditional works that reflect more modern times, students can really expand on what they are reading and can grow from that,” Stewart said.

Additionally, Stewart said instead of using the books as whole class assignments, the new materials will be placed in the hands of smaller breakout groups, of about six to eight students.

Stewart and Literacy Team started the application process last spring to meet the May deadline. The six-page application took more work than expected, but Stewart credits Corinna Crumpton and Leanne Caparro with carrying a large load in the process.

According to a press release from the Dollar General Literacy Foundation, more than 3,000 schools, public libraries and non-profit organizations from across the nation applied for a youth literacy grants.

In Georgia, slightly more than 40 schools and organizations applied for and were awarded project funding.