Twenty-three percent of Tift County families live below the poverty level, a figure that local educators and reading instructors believe is related to lack of education. (The statewide statistic is 16.8 percent.) Illiteracy also affects economic development, health care costs and a myriad of other issues.

While the Reading Capital of the World initiative and school system programs like Reading Recovery and Literacy Collaborative focus on building a love of reading in primary school-age children, organizers believe a pilot program getting under way at G.O. Bailey this week may be the solution to an unsolved problem: how to have children from uneducated families ready to
learn when they get to school. 

The program, which hasn’t been named yet, is based on a simple idea. The Tift County Foundation for Educational Excellence, working with the Tift County School System, has identified a group of pre-schoolers who have older siblings attending G.O. Bailey. The foundation is asking parents to emphasize the importance of books and reading and to see that the younger
children have someone read to them for a specified period every day. In return, the foundation will mail the child a free book every month until he or she starts kindergarten, provide bookends for the child’s personal library and keep a steady stream of appropriate books coming to the family.

A “reading ambassador” will collect data every morning at school.  Foundation volunteers will present the idea to parents at a series of breakfasts this week. “We’re really excited about this program,” Tift County School Superintendent Harold Abbott said Friday. “We think it holds
tremendous potential for getting students started on the right foot.  “It’s like a group of children trying out for Little League ball. One child may have never had a ball pitched to him before, and next to him there might be a child whose dad has worked with him 20 minutes a day for four years, throwing the ball to him. Well, we know who’s going to be a better player. “It’s the same with youngsters who have had someone read to them consistently. Their vocabularies are 10 times as large as someone’s who’s never been read to. These students who have never had anyone read to them are just as disadvantaged in school as the students who never had the ball
pitched to them are at the tryouts.”

Will it work? Foundation Director Mike Brumby helped organize the Reading Capital of the World program and hopes to see local readers hit the 2 million mark in Accelerated Reader points earned this December. He believes the new initiative is “something that’s in the realm of realism.”  “We want to see how much we can enter into that child’s family life,” Brumby
said. “I think we have a good idea here, if we can do it. Whether it can realistically be done will depend on a) if you can get them read to every day, will it make a difference; and b) Will the family do it. I’m not sure. It might be too much, but I know this much: Tifton is a very special place with can-do people. It’s not a community that waits for someone else to come
by and save its fanny.” 

Reaching young children is vital, Literacy Volunteers of America Director Marilois Laster said. Laster administers one of the few LVA chapters in South Georgia and also teaches a jail Graduate Equivalency Diploma and literacy program. 
“It is much easier to teach a young child to read than it is an adult,” Laster said. “The young brain is like a sponge and can soak up information; with the older brain it gets more difficult.” Laster said she sees a definite correlation between illiteracy and incarceration and has noticed a drop in recidivism when individuals earn GEDs. Illiteracy also affects the local economy in other ways as available jobs become more and more technical. 

“There was a time when this wasn’t an issue, but now, with all the jobs that have left for other countries, all of the jobs for unskilled labor are gone,” Tifton-Tift County Chamber of Commerce President and CEO James Chavez said. “Companies have to produce more with less people to compete.From the industrial side, to compete in a global economy, companies have to use
technology. And if you can’t read, you can’t operate the equipment in the plant.” 

For Brumby, Abbott and the foundation, next week’s kickoff will mark a long-planned goal, one that they hope will have a lasting effect. “I think this is something people will rally to,” Brumby said. “We’ve got a chance. It’s not hurting anybody, and it’s going to help families, churches,
community and schools and change the way people feel about themselves.” 

“Of any single thing that can be done, I think the most important is instilling the love of reading and excitement about it,” Abbott said. “Really, in education as a whole, the thing that will make the biggest difference of all would be for society as a whole to put a greater value on education. If parents and everybody else pushed education and student achievement and told their children ‘You are going to college and you are going to be an honor student, and I’m going to help you. I’ll read to you and I’ll make sure you get to school every day that you can,’ we wouldn’t
see many problems in school.”