By Tiye Barnes
For many Village Academy students, summer break means sleeping late, kicking back with video games and hanging out with friends.
But several couldn’t escape school completely: students in kindergarten and pre-k will be busy turning the pages of books, discovering, talking about, and developing a love for reading.
“The goal for today is investing in summer learning and what affects our schools and kids,” Principal Guarn Sims said Monday as he launched the pilot summer reading celebration on his campus. “Kids have so much time off in the summer they lose a lot of ground.”
About a dozen community leaders were invited to read books to the students. Each child selected a stack of five books to take home in a backpack.
Sims said the books were intended to stop “summer learning slide.”
The district cited research showing that as much as 85 percent of the achievement gap between students from low-income and high-income families can be attributed to the loss of reading skills during the summer.
“We want to make sure students stay on track to be successful,” he said.
The volunteers also told the toddlers about the importance of reading daily at home and encouraged them to have their parents read to them throughout the summer.
“Reading is so important, and summertime is the perfect time to read a book, even if it’s not for a school assignment,” said Delray Beach Police Capt. Michael Coleman. “There are plenty of reading lists out there that schools have provided.”
The project is sponsored through the school district’s Graduation Task Force. Village Academy is one of two schools selected to participate.
School officials hope to recruit mentors from the event in hopes of improve the graduation rate for black boys.
“The overall goal of this project is for men participating in the “kick-off” celebration to hopefully serve as mentors in that school,” Sims said.