Seven years ago, when Boscawen Elementary School won its first $25,000 grant to promote literacy, reading specialist Jen Kusnarowis said students were just getting excited about reading when the pandemic arrived and blunted all momentum.
“We started building this culture of literacy,” Kusnarowis said, “and then it got cut short.”
Now, Boscawen Elementary has an opportunity to get the ball rolling again. Winners of the Children’s Literacy Foundation’s Year of the Book grant for a second time, the school’s celebrations kicked off last week with a visit from foundation founder Duncan McDougall, who regaled fifth graders with the story of Frenchman Philippe Petit’s harrowing high-wire traverse of the Twin Towers.
“That is an amazing guy, and that is the kind of thing you can do with books,” McDougall told the 24 fifth graders assembled in the school’s library as he finished the Caldecott Medal-winning “The Man Who Walked Between the Towers”.
“You can start reading a book,” he said. “You can go back 50 years, you can walk the high wire between the twin towers, you can have all that experience using the most powerful form known to man: your imagination.”
McDougall has been traversing New Hampshire and Vermont since 1998, making the same pitch to students at low- and moderate-income schools. Schools in the two states are eligible for the grant if at least 35% of their students qualify for free or reduced lunch and at least 30% score below proficient on reading and writing assessments.
In addition to Boscawen, two Concord elementary schools — Mill Brook and Beaver Meadow — won the grants this year and last year, respectively.
The funding covers eight new books for every student this year, along with a series of visits from authors and illustrators, additional books for the school and public libraries, and events for parents. A subsequent “momentum” grant the following year covers two additional books for each student.
Every morning before McDougall leaves his Vermont home for a school visit, he said he packs about $10,000 worth of books into his car. Last week, students in Boscawen received their first book of the year from among the 20 boxes of books McDougall brought.
Fifth grader Liliana Baughman selected a book called “I Survived the Great Chicago Fire, 1871” from a historical fiction series that McDougall touted.
“I like learning the past,” said Baughman, who said her favorite book in the series was about the Titanic.
As the students went up one by one to grab their books, fifth grader Emmitt Diminico lingered at the front – caught up in the many choices available to him. Initially drawn to a book about LeBron James that McDougall mentioned, Diminico ultimately settled on an adventure saga called “The One and Only Bob.”
“My brother told me that it was a really good book, so I trust him, and hope it’s a good book,” Diminico said.
The wide variety of titles is intentional, McDougall said. It’s far easier to get students excited about reading when the topic is intrinsically interesting.
Kusnarowis, who has worked at Boscawen for 20 years, said that as technology has proliferated, it has grown more challenging to get students excited about reading.
“It’s not a pastime that a lot of kids gravitate towards anymore,” she said. “They’d rather be on their phones or their computers.”
Miles away in Concord, Mill Brook school has another challenge: 13% of students are English language learners who collectively speak 18 different languages.
The grant will allow the school and public library to purchase books in many of those languages, from Kinyarwanda to Tagolag.
“In order to let all of them get books about their geographic location and traditions and cultures in different languages – having the funding to be able to do that is going to be super helpful and hopefully get them to be super excited about reading as well,” said Jessica Knight, a digital learning specialist and the coordinator of Mill Brook’s grant.
Knight said it is not always easy to find books in certain languages. She will rely on a range of databases to find them.
For families who struggle to afford books for their children, the grant will make a major difference, McDougall said.
“For us to be able to be back in schools again and to provide brand new books to kids —many of whom have few or no books at home — is a very powerful thing because when kids have access to the printed word 24/7, they’re much more likely to be readers,” he said.