Now, Reading Makes Cents

Here’s a novel way to get kids reading more: Pay them. Or, more specifically, pay their schools. That’s what Gov. Gray Davis is doing through a new state program meant to encourage leisure reading among public school students. The Governor’s Reading Award Program is doling out $2 million to 400 elementary and middle schools whose students read the most pages during a six-month contest that ended in April. In all, the students logged more than 689 million pages. Here is a snapshot of campuses in the region that logged the greatest number of pages.

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Rather than relying on gifts or cash awards to coax their students to read an epic 5,232,180 pages--the most in the state, let alone Orange County--teachers at Harbour View Elementary School used simpler motivational tools:

Visual aids and grades.

The school, part of the Ocean View Elementary district, devised its first read-at-home program for children years ago, focusing on the number of minutes students read, rather than pages logged. Under the governor’s reading push this year, the program was expanded and switched to counting pages and was included on students’ report cards, said Assistant Principal Anna Dreifus.

Harbour View educators gave their literacy pursuit a soggy theme--”Read Across the Wetlands”--and they promoted it in morning announcements, staff newsletters and correspondence with parents.

The wetlands theme was appropriate for the 870-student school near the shore. All students have kept folders tracking their reading progress through the school year.

On the folder is a map showing a path from the school through the wetlands to a lighthouse. Students play the role of hikers who progress by levels (from the school to the bluffs, for example) and get stickers on their maps after reading a preset number of pages appropriate for their grade.

The map has 15 levels--and every student is expected to progress through at least 10 of them, to the pelican level. More devoted readers (about half the student body) have finished all 15 steps, to the lighthouse level. One fifth-grade girl has trekked to the lighthouse and back three times. Her mother reports that she reads every spare second between school, basketball practice and dinner.

“The key to our success is that this year we made participation [in the reading program] a requirement,” Dreifus said. “Every teacher wrote it in on the report card, with a ‘satisfactory’ or ‘unsatisfactory,’ so it was actually something parents saw. That drove the point [home] that this was important, and it was mentioned constantly in the teacher and school newsletters.”

At the end of the year, on Thursday, all students will be treated to a literacy day, where they will dress up as their favorite book characters and listen to a speech from a children’s author. Those who reach the top level will not only get their names read in morning announcements, but also will meet the author personally.

The authors always bring rough drafts of their books, Dreifus said. “So the kids get to see that it’s not just their work that gets red [editing] marks all over it. . . . The kids get to see that writing doesn’t just happen; it’s work.”