As you walk through the halls of Sinclair, you may have noticed the various bins for book donations for Project Read in some of the buildings on campus. Project Read, an organization for promoting literacy in and around Dayton is organizing a book give-away to children in kindergarten through third grade for summer break.
Laura Mlazovsky, executive director of Project Read, said that grade scores of children drop over the summer break and reading books helps to keep literacy skills on top so that children are better prepared for the coming school year.
“Research shows that by providing children with 10 to 20 self-selected books at the end of the school year, many children not only maintain their reading skills but make gains,” she said.
In a YouTube video by Brian Williams of NBC, he said “the [summer] activities and lifestyle of the middle income family (summer camp, museums) keep the child moving forward, but the low income child has fewer opportunities to reinforce good habits like reading, and that child falls further behind.”
An achieved goal of 20,000 books would help them to provide 10 free books for children who are in families with less resources and high needs to take home with them to keep. Mlazovsky quotes a statistic by The National Institute of Literacy that said, “61 percent of inner-city urban homes don’t have books.”
Project Read is a “grass-roots” organization geared toward increasing literacy in adults and children, and was started in 1988 by individual literacy groups to create a helpline for one-on-one tutoring in reading. In 1990, Ned Sifflen, the president of Sinclair Community College at the time, invited Project Read to set up their office on campus to assist future students to achieve better reading skills before taking the Accuplacer Test when applying. The office space is provided to Project Read for free and they are located in Building 3, Room 142.
In the Library Loggia near the doors connecting to Buildings 2 and 3, there are two sets of bookshelves for free books that students may take from or leave for others to take.
Bins for collecting books for free distribution are located in different buildings on campus. One is located in Building 10, outside of the Tartan Cafe, and another is located outside of the Academic Resource Center (ARC) in Building 7.
Project Read is also accepting volunteers to help tutor adults to obtain their GED. Sessions would be one hour long and would be done in the ARC. For more information, contact Mlazovsky at 512-3104 or Laura.Mlazovsky@sinclair.edu.