University of Colorado
President's Teaching Scholars Program

It’s a hurricane of an idea: provide books and backpacks for the hundreds of Hurricane Katrina evacuee children living in Colorado Springs.

Professor Barbara Swaby, director of the graduate reading program at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, figured reading material is far down on the list of necessities for families who need to replace absolutely everything.

And so was born LOGO, for Literacy on the Go.

“If you are fleeing for your life, you don’t pack books even if you had them,” Swaby says.

LOGO already is expanding to include homeless and “low wealth” children in the Colorado Springs area. Swaby would like to see the idea catch on nationally.

Organizers are asking Springs residents, businesses and school groups to donate new or gently used books, dictionaries, atlases, blank journals, trade books, pencils, pens, comic books and such.

This is no one-time deal. The reading materials will be given to children every quarter they are in school. This would provide a minimum of 48 books each year through high school.

When LaVonne Neal, dean of the UCCS College of Educa- tion, challenged her instructors to come up with ideas to offer help in wake of Katrina, it didn’t take Swaby long.

After all, she reads a children’s book to her graduate students every day at the start of classes. “They whine if I don’t,” she says.

Swaby, a nationally known literary expert, saw the project as one way to whittle away at some dismal statistics:

• Sixty-one percent of poor children have no books in their homes, according to The Read Seed Inc. Mission.

• A typical middle-class child arrives at school having been read to an average 1,000 hours. For low-income children, the figure is 25 hours.

• Students in homes with more than 100 books had average reading scores of 552 points, whereas those from homes with 10 or fewer books had an average of 466 points, according to the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study.

• Worldwide, having children’s books in the home was more predictive of children’s reading success than having books in general. Students from homes with more than 10 children’s books have significantly higher average reading scores than scores of students from homes with fewer.

Excerpts from an article written by Carol McGraw
Origanally in The Gazette, Oct 15, 2005