Read Across Jacksonville Kicks Off Today

By Benjamin Cox on February 24, 2020 at 1:16pm

Jacksonville Public Schools will get a visit from the Kiwanis this week. The Kiwanians will be providing story time to several class rooms for the Read Across Jacksonville program beginning today in partnership with Beckham’s Bookshelf and Bound-To-Stay-Bound. 8 year old Beckham Oldenettel started the program to provide donated books to kids who maybe didn’t have one in the district.

Beckham’s mom, Lori-Large Oldenettel, explains they had a lot of books to give away to the community: “We were thinking about how we can actually give books out to children but how can we read to them, as well. We wanted to partner with area schools and day cares. Of course when you do that, you need volunteers. Being a member of Kiwanis, we got Kiwanis involved because that’s a part of the Kiwanis mission. I brought that to our current president, Andy Smith, and with him working at Bound-To-Stay-Bound and created another great partnership for us. Andy said they wanted to be more visible in the community about their upcoming [50th] anniversary. It was kind of the perfect storm for the 3 of these groups to come together and make this event possible.”

The Kiwanians will be visiting 7 district schools and 1 day care center throughout the week in hopes of reading to 1017 children in 50 separate classrooms. Students will be getting a book and the classrooms will be getting a copy of the book being read to them. The read-aloud series will run through the entire week in hopes of distributing the books that Beckham had been collecting for over a year.