Growing up, Louisville resident Amberly Simpson said she remembers sitting in the hallway of her home while her mom read her dozens of “Hardy Boys” and “Nancy Drew” books.
Now, as a mother of two young children — a 3-year-old and an 11-month old — Simpson said she wants to foster a love of reading in her family, but books can be too expensive.
“Especially when you want to buy them on your own,” she said. “And I love the library, but with schedules, it can be hard to get down there. So what I often do is we'll check out books and then I'll return them eight months later.”
Simpson found “worry-free access to books” with the nonprofit Imagination Library of Louisville, which sends her kids a free book each, every month up until they turn five.
Recently, the Imagination Library of Louisville delivered its 500,000th book to a kid in the city after nine years of the program. Roughly two out of every five toddlers and preschoolers in Louisville are enrolled, according to executive director Maria Gurren.
“Not every child is growing up in a home that has the luxury of having tons of books,” Gurren said. “This program truly has a mission to make sure that every child has access to high-quality reading materials in early childhood and those crucial years for development.”
All the books in the Imagination Library of Louisville’s collection are selected by the Dollywood Foundation and a group of child literacy experts. The committee selects 12 books published by Penguin Random House for each age group from 1 to 5 years old. The collection is determined by “quality of story, quality of illustration, diversity of characters and developmental milestones,” Gurren said.
“Children receive the books based on the year that they were born, so they are age-appropriate,” she said. “So starting off with the board books, and then as kids get older, the stories grow with them.”
Every month, each kid enrolled in the program receives a book with their name on it by mail from Tennessee to their doorstep.
A kid signed up at birth would receive 60 books before they reach kindergarten. Their first book would be “The Little Engine That Could,” and their last book would be “Look Out Kindergarten, Here I Come!” with a signed note from Imagination Library’s founder Dolly Parton.
The Imagination Library sends more than 20,000 books each month to Jefferson County.
“A book arriving as a gift in the mail that you get to unwrap, that has your name on it, can create that attachment to books and reading at an early age,” Gurren said. “So that child may end up becoming a book lover for life like I did.”
While her children are too young to read independently, Louisville parent Simpson said she enjoys reading the new books to her kids each month and watching them pick out favorites in their budding collection.
“When [my daughter] tries to read independently, she'll narrate what she thinks is going on or what she sees in the pictures and what she imagines it to be,” Simpson said. “So she's starting to make sense of and contextualize images and actions in a way that I don't think she would have done if we hadn't exposed her to books really early.”
Simpson grew up reading children’s classics, like Dr. Seuss, in the 1990s. She said the books her kids receive in the program represent diverse communities.
“The books that are in the Imagination Library are so much more reflective of different people in the world from different lifestyles to different cultural backgrounds to different family dynamics are all represented in the books that you receive,” she said.
So far, Simpson said her daughter has read books about rural farm communities, the significance of dragons in Chinese culture and different types of family dynamics.
“They're not just getting exposure to rhyme and zoo animals,” she said. “They're learning about all different types of people and places and customs and traditions through these books.”
The Imagination Library of Louisville also offers a bilingual library that offers books in English and Spanish.
Youth literacy in Kentucky
According to a report from Metro United Way, only about 44% of kids entering Jefferson County Public Schools are ready for kindergarten. That is why book access for kids under five is crucial, Gurren said.
Christie Biggerstaff is the director of early literacy for the Kentucky Department of Education.
“Children who are read to regularly, before school, after school, they have stronger vocabularies,” Biggerstaff said. “They enter kindergarten prepared to learn to read.”
About two-thirds of Kentucky’s fourth graders were not proficient in reading, according to reporting from the Kentucky Lantern.
“Reading by the end of third grade is one of the biggest signs of long term academic success, even high school graduation or jail rates, prison rates,” Biggerstaff said.
In 2022, the Kentucky General Assembly passed the Read to Succeed Act. The bill implements more training and resources for teachers, parents and elementary school students to improve proficiencies in reading by the time a student reaches third grade.
All Kentucky teachers now have access to extra literacy training and instructional resources to assist students in the classroom.
Biggerstaff said these efforts will take time, and she said the new resources for teachers better support the five pillars of literacy that are crucial to effective reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.
She said she hopes more structured literacy resources will “impact Kentucky students for the better” and “turn the tide” in the Commonwealth.
“When we align research resources and relationships, we can create a literacy movement that lasts generations,” Biggerstaff said.
Parents can use an online guide to implement some of the new methods — such as running a finger along the words while reading and practicing phonemic awareness — at home. The resource is also available in Spanish, Nepali, Swahili, Kinyarwanda and Arabic.
