The District of Columbia Public School System (DCPS) today announced it has launched a citywide reading initiative challenging the DCPS community to read more. “Read Across the City: The Three Million Minute Challenge” starts this month and includes all 115 public schools, encouraging kids, teachers, staff, and parents to read every day, giving them online tools to track books read and the time spent reading them. The goal is to hit three million minutes by April 2018.
While the challenge is district-wide, each school library has its own individual website where students can track their reading. DCPS is using Beanstack, software that gives libraries tools to facilitate reading programs and makes it easy for users to track how much they’ve read on any computer or mobile device.
In addition to the “Read Across the City” challenge, schools can use the software to design their own reading initiatives.
The three-month program will also support DCPS’s recently unveiled strategic plan, “A Capital Commitment,” which calls for all district students to read at or above grade level by grade 3.
Thirty challenge winners will receive a 50-new book kit filled the industry’s best books from Junior Library Guild (JLG) from Media Source, Inc. In addition, each school will be awarded a one-year subscription to JLG—a $1200 value—and can choose from over 75 categories of PreK-12 grade fiction and nonfiction books for their schools.
