By Roz Brown
It almost could be mistaken for lyrics to a country song, but a music icon’s commitment to literacy has been a hit with more than more than 30,000 New Mexico kids.
Dolly Parton’s commitment to literacy has reached millions of children through her nonprofit Imagination Library. In 2010, Grant County’s Bayard Public Library became the state’s first affiliate of the program, which provides free, high-quality books to children from birth to age 5, regardless of family income.
Nancy Stephens, director of the program for the state and Grant County, said local library affiliates secure funding to pay for the books, register children and promote the effort.
“This is a way of putting books into kids’ hands where the parents don’t have to research what book to buy,” Stephens explained. “They don’t have to pay for them. They just have to open their mailbox.”
The initiative was founded in Parton’s home state of Tennessee in 1995. Books are selected by a panel with the Dollywood Foundation, and children with the same year of birth receive the same books. Parton, now 80 years old, the singer who wrote the hit “9 to 5” and many other hits, has said she was motivated to start the program because her father could not read or write and because she rarely saw books in friends’ homes while growing up.
Recent data show 80% of New Mexico’s fourth graders are not proficient in reading but research shows reading to children can help.
New Mexico has joined many other states by creating a statewide Imagination Library program. Stephens pointed out it will provide $1 million in additional funding this year, increasing the number of children who receive books to 30,000.
“It’s about $30 per child per year,” Stephens emphasized. “$30 covers 12 books and their postage. And then here in New Mexico, the Early Childhood Education and Care Department, they reimburse every local partner 80%.”
Because New Mexico now has a statewide program, Stephens added affiliates can participate in the program’s bilingual track, where all books children receive are bilingual, or an occasional book is bilingual. She said the options can be found at most libraries but in-person visits have dropped since the pandemic.
“Sometimes, we think that families go to the library more than they do, but we’ve done surveys that show more than 50% of families haven’t visited the library in a year,” Stephens acknowledged.
Stephens noted the books are affordable because the foundation has a longstanding partnership with Penguin Random House.
Support for this reporting was provided by the Andrew Carnegie Foundation, formerly Carnegie Corporation of New York.
