The Best Days Ever

 Yesterday was a very good day.

It was day we shipped out the second set of teacher books to the 185 classrooms enrolled this school year in Appalachian Literacy Initiative.

I'll back up a moment, and explain. Appalachian Literacy Initiative, ALI, is the non-profit my friend Tracy Griffith and I started four years ago to increase low-income Appalachian students' access to books. It began when I stumbled upon the horrifying statistic that, among fourth graders enrolled in public schools in the United States, those whose parents can afford to pay for school lunch (roughly $2/day) are two and a half times more likely to read at proficient level than those who get free school lunch.

In Bristol, Virginia, over 90% of the kids get free lunch.

Tracy was equally horrified. We started educating ourselves, and learned that the biggest barrier to reading success in low-income kids was simply access to books. So we started giving kids books. We enroll public school classrooms in Appalachia that have more than 50% of their students getting free lunch. Four times per year we mail the teachers sets of six books; the teachers keep those books and show them to their students. The students decide which of the books they'd like a copy of, the teachers send us the orders, and we send the students books. The end.

The student orders come in over a period of several weeks, so that while we're shipping books every week, the only time we have to do massive ship-outs, like yesterday, is when we're shipping the teacher sets. And this year, since we added schools into the program until just a few weeks ago, we staggered the first shipment of teacher sets. And our program has grown massively even since last year. All of that meant that yesterday was a Big Day. Tracy, Kathy, Shannon, and Caroline started working at 10 am. Another nonprofit, Bristol Faith in Action, has donated the use of the room we like to call ALI World Headquarters, but yesterday we took over the big conference room too. I had an appointment and got there late; when I did I started printing mailing labels and moving boxes into the lobby for the postman. We got everything finished around 3:30, and then Tracy and I hung around tidying up loose bits and discussing how our new organizational system worked. (Very well. Tracy's a genius at this stuff.) And then, just as we were about to leave, we got an email from Parents magazine.

Last June they came and filmed us for a segment for their website. We hadn't heard anything back from the producers until yesterday, when they sent us this: 

We sat and watched it together.

There have been other times when Tracy and I have stopped to consider what, with the help of so many others, we've managed to accomplish so far. The year we got to do book fairs for all the Bristol Virginia students--we'd be staggering out to the car at the end of the day, carrying the few remaining boxes of books, and we'd look at each other, and smile. We'd say, "Hey. We did good."

Yesterday was like that. Yesterday reminded me of the time I recall at the very end of the video, when I gave a kid some books, that he chose, and heard him say to a friend, as he walked out of the room, "This is the best. Day. Ever."