A Push for Page Turners

With the support of several corporations, the Los Angeles County Office of Education on Tuesday kicked off a drive to recruit 25,000 volunteers who will seek to boost literacy among young children by reading aloud to them in school.

The Reading: Basic Success Initiative, a statewide effort, combines corporate sponsors with Rolling Readers USA, California’s largest nonprofit children’s literacy organization. The initiative’s goal: to place volunteers in every school district in Los Angeles County by next fall.

The volunteers will read to children in kindergarten through third grade for at least an hour a week, a formula that will help promote academic success in children’s most formative years, organizers said.

A standing-room-only crowd of several hundred parents, teachers and students at Russell Elementary School in South Los Angeles welcomed representatives from Southern California Edison Co., American Honda Motor Co. and Scholastic Inc. as they pledged their support to increase the number of reading volunteers.

The program of heartfelt speeches and children singing inspirational songs and playing hand bells culminated in Scholastic’s donation of 50,000 books to the initiative and a promise to supply another 1,000 books for every 1,000 volunteer hours pledged by a corporation.

Currently, there are 1,600 Rolling Readers volunteers in 15 Los Angeles County school districts, including Los Angeles Unified, and they work with about 35,000 young people, said Frank Kwan, a county Office of Education spokesman.

The local campaign is tied to President Clinton’s nationwide push for increased literacy, called the America Reads Challenge. During his 1996 reelection campaign Clinton set a national goal of having all children reading well by the end of third grade. Clinton launched the America Reads Challenge in response to a 1994 federal study revealing that 40% of the nation’s fourth-graders were not reading at grade level.

“My opinion is that unless we get more parent and community involvement, our children will suffer,” said county Supt. of Schools Donald Ingwerson.

“I am so pumped,” said Carol Rasco, national director of the America Reads Challenge, in response to the turnout Tuesday. “This is truly the embodiment of what President Clinton envisioned.”

Donna Hammond, who spearheaded American Honda’s involvement, said reading to children “brings to them the wonders of reading, the discovery of an outside culture. It gives them the idea of dreaming and imagining.”

Honda has nearly 90 corporate volunteers who work with children at Carson Elementary School in Carson in a program begun in May.

Consiletia Huddleston, 32, of Los Angeles said she has read aloud and tutored children at Russell Elementary five days a week for more than a year. “The greatest thing to see is the children’s increase in self-esteem,” said Huddleston, whose two daughters, DeJonnet Hubbard, 7, and Gabrielle Hubbard, 6, are first-graders at Russell.

“The kids like it when people other than their teachers care about them,” she said.

Those wishing to join the drive can call (800) 390-READ. Staff members will interview them and assign them to a school in their area.