City celebrates literacy success at River City Readers summer event
Jacksonville families had a million reasons to celebrate reading last month, when Mayor Donna Deegan, the Jacksonville Public Library and literacy advocates celebrated the success of the River City Readers initiative at a summer kickoff event.
Held June 8 at Ed Austin Regional Park, the gathering highlighted the success of the program and its Beanstack mobile app, which allows parents and guardians to log their children’s reading minutes, titles read and other literacy activities. While the program initially set a cumulative goal of 300,000 reading minutes for the year, Deegan announced at the event that participating readers had surpassed 1 million minutes.
“It’s just really so important that we all are telling everyone in the city that this is the initiative that will really, into the future, make us a successful city,” Deegan said, “because we know that readers are leaders.”
Attendees were able to collect free books to add to their home libraries, meet local authors, participate in story times by Jacksonville author Hello Mr. Joe, get their faces painted and more.
Trisha Suarez brought her family out to the event and said this was her first time hearing about the Beanstack app, which can be downloaded from the Apple App and Google Play stores. She said she looks forward to using it to log her childrens’ reading minutes and books read.
“I like events like this because it gets you outdoors and then you get to see all the different authors to encourage [the kids] to read more,” Suarez said.
Coral Worley also loved the opportunity to get her little ones outdoors at an event that focuses on reading.
“My kids love reading up to a point,” she said. “This is an opportunity to get them out and to see more books.”
According to the River City Readers dashboard on the city website, nearly 900 readers have joined the initiative.
