Augusta's three Rotary Clubs have banded together and are asking the community's support for an initiative to stamp out illiteracy in Richmond County.
"We see a lot of potential partnerships," said Ernie Sizemore, former president of the Rotary Club of Augusta, who spoke at a meeting Monday at Augusta State University about the Ferst Foundation Literacy program.
Representatives from other civic clubs, educational groups, county government and the business sector attended the meeting.
About 23 percent of Georgia's adults have low literacy. Twenty percent of the population lives in poverty and 61 percent of those living in poverty do not have a single book suitable for a child to read, according to statistics from the Ferst Foundation. Children who are not read to before they start school are not as ready for kindergarten as those who have been read to.
Robin Ferst started her foundation 10 years ago in Morgan County and patterned it after Dolly Parton's Imagination Library project. With her own money, Ms. Ferst began sending age-appropriate books to children once a month.
Through the program, children from birth through age 5 receive a book in the mail once a month.
The first year, Ms. Ferst distributed 600 books. A decade later, the Ferst Foundation is providing books to children in 67 Georgia counties, including McDuffie and Lincoln, and has distributed more than 1.5 million books to 81,000 children.
"We wanted to do this in a metropolitan community," Ms. Ferst said Monday of the partnership with the Rotary Clubs. Her ultimate goal is to have every child in the state younger than 5 enrolled.
The three Rotary Clubs have combined to adopt 100 2- and 3-year-old children in Augusta with a target start date of Jan. 1, but there are about 15,000 children younger than 5 in Richmond County.
Mr. Sizemore said he hoped to find 10 to 12 leaders from Monday's meeting who would be willing to head the initiative in Richmond County. He estimates it would cost about $540,000 a year to provide books for all the children in Richmond County.
In Morgan County, the percentage of children prepared for kindergarten has jumped from 43 percent to 90 percent.
Ms. Ferst said the benefits seen there and in other rural Georgia counties have touched the lives of adults as well.
When she started the program, there was no adult literacy program in the town of Madison, but within six months 127 people were taking part in one.
The Augusta Chronicle ©2010 Morris Communications, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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Why are people so infatuated with tackling the symptons instead of attacking the problem of a generational welfare system that promotes unwanted children by people who do not have the means to raise them. Sterilize all women on welfare and abort all babies to pregnant women on welfare.
You can see a presentation about the literacy program, which was made to a local Rotary club, on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9js5Ldn70jY.
It is good for those (even adults) to be able to read and keep this going, wish I knew of this program a long time ago