A simple idea is having an extraordinary impact on literacy and local communities: take a book, leave a book. Students walk up, open the door of a dollhouse-sized wooden box, and take a book. They can keep it, return it, or replace it with one which they have already enjoyed, ready for the next person to indulge in.
Part of the reimagining of Detroit has been the impressive rise of these “Little Libraries”, popping up like roses amid the asphalt, and the Detroit Public School System is using the idea to make sure kids cultivate a love of reading by installing them in schools this summer.
Known as the “summer slide”, there is a marked decline in reading during the summer school break. This problem is even more prevalent and detrimental in areas of lower economic stability, where children from book-impoverished neighborhoods are falling behind their peers living in neighborhoods where summer reading materials are plentiful and easy to access.
45 million. That’s how many words a child in a typical well-to-do white-collar family will hear by the time they are 4 years old. That might sound like a lot, not for the reason that it is a lot of words for a child— the vast majority of a human’s neural connections are formed by age 3— but because of how it to a poor child’s exposure to vocabulary. By the time s/he is 4, a child on welfare might only have heard 13 million words.
Dr. Susan Neuman, a former University of Michigan professor and literacy expert now at New York University, published a study just last month in the journal Urban Education showing that there is just one book for every 42 children in a Detroit neighborhood. Neuman and her co-author on the new study, Naomi Moland, an assistant professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, walked and biked the streets of neighborhoods in Detroit, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., meticulously combing each block for businesses selling print resources for kids of any age, including fiction and nonfiction books and newspapers. They compared low and middle-income neighborhoods and, overall, they found just 2 percent of all the businesses in those neighborhoods selling print resources for children ages 0 through 18; most of those were dollar stores. After breaking down the data by neighborhood and age group, it became clear that children’s books are a rarity in high-poverty urban communities.
But just one Little Library at each school has the potential to dramatically change that number.
The first official DPS Little Free Library was opened at Marcus Garvey Academy and the district has plans to install more, in partnership with Detroit Little Libraries, Detroit Public Schools Foundation, Detroit Public Library, and the national Little Free Library. In fact, the goal is to install 97 little libraries at all 97 Detroit public schools in 97 days.
The libraries are changing the decline of book access in an era when many schools no longer have libraries, public libraries have shuttered or cut back hours of operation, and transportation issues can hinder residents’ access to social and economic building blocks.
Studies show time and again that access to books, regardless of reading level, can increase literacy and set people on a trajectory that will change their lives.
With 27 of the 97 libraries put in place thanks to sponsorship by members of the community, this could become a blueprint for other school districts across the nation to circulate books among children, including teens working with Summer in the City, who painted blank Little Free Libraries and placed them around the city. Kids at Hatch Art’s Hands On summer camp are also painting some of the blank libraries. Local artists are creating libraries that will be placed in Detroit community gardens this fall. The libraries will debut at the Michigan State Fair, where fair-goers will get to vote on their favorites, to be placed the Conservatory on Belle Isle, Eastern Market, and the Grace Lee Boggs Center in the coming months.
Beyond the school district, and in communities across the nation, they are placed in front of homes, small businesses, nonprofits, parks, health care centers, community gardens, and anywhere else that communities walk by or gather. Last year, Little Free Library Founder, Todd Bol, flattered the work being done in Detroit and declared it to be the fastest growing city of Little Free Libraries in the nation.
In the immortal words of Dr. Seuss, “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you will go.”
For more information on the study, visit Where Books Are All But Nonexistent.
To sponsor a school library or donate to the crowd funding initiative, go to http://detroitlittlelibraries.org/sponsor-school/.
Sources: Metro Times, The Atlantic
© 2016 R. Wolf Baldassarro/Deep Forest Productions
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