Causes: Children & Youth, Education, Literacy, Remedial Reading & Encouragement

Mission: Guided by the fact that literacy is essential to lifelong success, Page Ahead provides new books and develops reading activities that empower at-risk children.

Results: Since our founding in 1990, we have given more than four million books to more than one million children.

2018 data from the MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) test of Seattle students participating in Book Up Summer show an average improvement in reading skills of 2.63 points over the summer for rising first graders and 1.84 points over the summer for rising second graders. Since students from majority low-income communities typically slide back in the summer, to see them actually gaining reading skill is exciting and a powerful endorsement of our work and this summer-reading model.

Target demographics: children identified as economically or educationally at-risk (including those from families experiencing low income, English language learners, and/or struggling readers)

Direct beneficiaries per year: 22,353 children by giving them 265,431 books

Geographic areas served: Washington State

Programs:
Book Up Summer: Every summer, while students from affluent families make progress on their reading skills, students from low-income families often lose ground—even though studies show they progress at comparable rates during the school year. Summer reading loss accounts for roughly 80 percent of the achievement gap between low-income students and their better-off peers. This phenomenon impacts children living in poverty the most, and its effects are cumulative. By the time a low-income student reaches junior high, that annual backslide in reading skill can leave them more than two years behind their better-resourced counterparts. Book Up Summer addresses this problem by reaching more than 20,000 K-2 students high-poverty elementary schools, giving them 12 books each to read during summer vacation, furnishing them with the resources and incentive necessary to read during the summer and helping them avoid summer learning loss—and ultimately helping to narrow the achievement gap.

Story Leaders: Children from lower-income homes have more limited access to books than their better-off peers. Because of this, preschoolers from low-income families have fewer home and preschool language and literacy opportunities than children from economically advantaged backgrounds—a major reason that they lag behind in reading achievement throughout the school years. Page Ahead’s Story Leaders program aims to close this word gap by empowering educators and families through literacy training and access to books. Story Leaders provides preschool teachers at Head Start and ECEAP (Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program) classrooms with specific shared reading techniques to help students actively participate in reading, building their confidence, vocabulary, and early reading skills; we also provide copies of the story-time books for children to take home so they can continue the reading practice with their families. By the end of the school year, each student will have received eight different books from in-class story times.

Story Times: Children need early reading exposure—pre-literacy skills like print awareness, the ability to sit still and listen to a story, and exposure to a high number of words are the foundation of later reading success. Page Ahead's Story Time program sends trained volunteers into preschool and kindergarten classes monthly to read books, sing songs, and do crafts on a theme, helping children to connect joyfully with reading.

Books for Kids: Page Ahead was originally founded under the name "Books for Kids" in 1990, and we still distribute books through that program by providing brand-new books to other organizations that serve underresourced kids across Washington State, with a particular emphasis on partnering with groups operating in rural areas.