SPRINGFIELD – Children in Springfield have already spent more than half a million minutes of their summer reading.

Molly Goren-Watts of the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission announced in a news conference on July 30 at the Springfield Central High School that a total of 558,380 minutes have been read by children through Springfield Reads to Build a Better World.

The kids are on track to read more than last year, as this year’s recorded minutes of reading for just halfway through the summer are nearly as much as last year’s total. Manager for Reading Success by 4th Grade, Chrissy Howard, told Reminder Publishing some of the summer programs don’t relay their information until the end of the summer, so they expect to see a large increase in the minutes read at that time.  

By the end of summer in 2018, children in Springfield had read a total of 778,250 minutes through the program. The total was a substantial increase from the summer of 2017, the first year of the program, where Springfield children read a total of 541,520 minutes.

The citywide program was created in 2017 to help spread the message of how important it is for children to read for 20 minutes a day. It was first developed as a collaboration between summer learning providers from community-based programs, Springfield Public Schools Early Start program for rising third graders, and the Springfield City Library.

Summer programs participating in the reading initiative make sure that each child in their program reads for at least 20 minutes every day, and then record how many kids read. The number of minutes read and the number of children reading in the city of Springfield are then tracked by the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission and Reading Success by 4th Grade, a group of leaders working to get Springfield’s children reading proficiently by the end of third grade.

The program has also been designed to connect to the Springfield City Library’s summer reading program so children can track their summer reading and have a chance to win prizes.

In total, 13 summer programs and all the Springfield Public Schools summer schools are participating in the reading program.

Howard said of all the activities the kids could be participating in throughout the summer, she’s happy that they’ve spent their summer reading.

“That’s a lot of time, think about what kids could be doing, playing video games or playing on your phone watching people unwrap things on Youtube,” she said to the kids during the news conference. “Instead you guys really spent a lot of time reading books, which is probably one of the most important things that you can do to help yourselves right now.”

The news conference also featured a reading from 7th grader, 12-year-old Elian Cepeda, who shared how much reading meant to him and how the summer program had helped him with his reading skills. Cepeda, who is bilingual, read his presentation in both English and Spanish.

“Reading has helped me over the summer. Why? Because I’m not a good English reader, and all my staff have tried to help me with it,” he said. “I want to say thank you to all my staff for helping me.”