Hello, my name is Elrene, "Elke" Davis and I represent the Estill County Board of Education RIF grant in Irvine, KY. I would like to thank the VOYA Committee for this tremendous honor. I would like to thank Superintendent Bert Hensley for nominating me. I would also like to thank the Family Resource Youth Service Center Directors and the school volunteers for their continuous support.

The staff in my building has always given me grief about the boxes of books in the hallway but now they tell me that I am on a trip down memory lane... I would like to share some highlights with you; I grew up in Pike County in eastern Kentucky with a mother and daddy that stressed reading and education. As a girl, when I was given money to spend, I would buy books including Bobbsey Twin stories that my friend Cindy now collects in antique stores, while I collect the Alice and Jerry books that were my basal readers when I learned to read. My early career ambition was to drive the bookmobile - there would be books to read and books to share.

I graduated from Eastern Kentucky University with a degree in elementary education, a master's degree in education with an emphasis in library science, and a Rank I degree in educational supervision. My husband, son and I live in Estill County which is in the foothills of the mountains southeast of Lexington, KY. It is a beautiful, rural county with more than 65% of the children currently receiving free and reduced meals. As an elementary classroom teacher and then a librarian, I determined that my long term goal would be to improve the literacy level of Estill County. I would do this by building a love for reading and showing my students that reading is fun. In turn, these students would read books with their children, because parents share with children what they remember as fun from their own childhood. I knew this from my own family and saw it again when Congressman Ben Chandler visited our RIF program - he brought along his favorite book that his mother had read to him as a boy to share with our students! To build this love of reading in my students, I wear costumes, use puppet and flannel board stories, use props (some of which my mother made), and continually read aloud with them. I have spent 36 years working with education in Estill County so I am sure I now have great-grand-students!

For many years as librarian, I hosted the annual book fair in each of my three schools and it was an anxiously awaited event. However, some children bought lots of books, while some children could not buy any books, and there were those that must have saved pennies for the entire year to spend at that book fair. Still, many of these children did not have enough money to buy the book they really wanted so you had to show them the books they could afford or you had to make up the difference in cost from your profit. After moving to the position of federal programs coordinator at the Central Office, I had the opportunity to apply for and receive a Reading Is Fundamental grant. I must stop and thank you from my heart - RIF means so much to me and to the families of Estill County. Since receiving the RIF grant, it has been a "Dream Book Fair" at least three times every year for the past 15 years - every student from preschool through eighth grade selects a book without looking at the price!

With research supporting the importance of parent involvement in the education of children, one of my next grant initiatives began in 1999 and continued through 2008 as a family literacy program that I called LEAP, Learning Empowers All Partners. As a RIF site for three of those years, and through other funding sources as well, children received free books at every LEAP meeting. LEAP was all about books and parents and children reading together. Teaching parents to become readers and to use books to teach and have fun with their children was the ultimate opportunity! After modeling reading a book, I would ask my parents to suggest a conversation they could have or what activity they could do with their children. I learned from preschool students that you could have in-depth discussions concerning such topics as the repercussions of telling lies following reading the story about Franklin fibbing - no one seemed to feel guilty because we were talking about turtles, not little boys and girls. RIF supports parent involvement at home by providing books for Estill County students to build personal libraries.

I am proud to represent Estill County and Kentucky as a RIF volunteer, but I also accept this award on behalf of all the teachers, school library media specialists and central office administrators across the nation that work to provide RIF books and book events for children. I want to thank the vendors, the family businesses, and government agencies that have and continue to support RIF initiatives.

I have not accomplished my goals independently, nor have I been a one woman show by any means. However, I set a goal and by being innovative and collaborative, I feel successful in impacting family literacy in Estill County. According to the demographic profiles from the Census of Population and Housing, from 1990 to 2000 the percentage of persons 25 and older in Estill County having the educational attainment of high school graduate or higher increased by 25.8%. RIF has not only supplied books for our children but has been very empowering for me - I feel responsible to do my best to assure that each distribution provides a quality selection of books and is a red letter day for our students. Thank you.

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