Taking Summer Literacy to the Streets!

Reading Is Fundamental (RIF) and the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) share a commitment to supporting students’ reading during the summer months when they are particularly at risk for learning loss. RIF and AASL believe deeply in the importance of keeping kids reading AND making it fun and engaging.  It’s also critical to support children and families right in their communities, making summer reading accessible for all.  Read on to hear how one school system is bringing summer literacy to the streets. Be sure to also check out RIF.org/Summer for free book lists, read-alouds, and summer reading fun.

The Richmond City (Virginia) Public Schools Lit Limo has been running throughout the city since 2020, delivering books to students between the ages of 0 to 18 to build their home libraries. Research supports that creating a love of literature stems from having a choice of books to read and that it is the most important factor. The Lit Limo mission is to foster and promote student choice when it comes to selecting a book, thereby creating a culture that fosters a love of reading. Students come on the bus, pick any book they desire, receive a small prize, and slide out the back. We stock the bus with both fiction and nonfiction, board books to young adult novels, and have an extensive bilingual section for our Spanish speaking community, which also encourages students to read in Spanish and English. Research affirms that children having access to books is vital and critical to successful summer reading, literacy development, and learning. Access to books and reading at home has been linked to overall improved academic performance. It is a win-win situation, books and learning.

We record the data from every stop to ensure that our routes are being the most strategic and reaching the greatest population of children each day. We evaluate our routes after every season to analyze and adjust for the greatest possible number of students to have books. Every summer we increase our stops and community events to further our reach. So far, the RPS Lit Limo has distributed over 100,000 books. The exact number is unknown but much higher because if a student asks for more than one book, we never say no!

We travel the city five days a week during the school year but our distribution really ramps up during the summer! It is so important to keep our students and community reading during the summer months and the Lit Limo runs all day to communities, day camps, community centers, neighborhoods and all types of special events to reach and deliver books to the students. The summer schedule is robust and purposeful in its plan.  The summer months provide extra free time for our students and our aim is to fill that time with reading.  We also partner with the Richmond Public Library for a summer reading program. The Lit Limo helps distribute flyers and information to our students about the program each summer. The program is based on minutes read, so we help students acquire their choice books to read. We strategically plan all of the stops to reach our students during the summer to keep them reading.

We have added stickers to our routine aiding in starting and creating a conversation at home about books.  The stickers have a picture of the Lit Limo and state that “I visited the Lit Limo today, ask me about my book!” The kids really love the stickers and we are hopeful that these stickers will spark a conversation with caregivers at home and lead to a robust book conversation.  We hope this conversation will lead to a culture of literacy in the homes of our students.

Many of the students in our district do not have ready access to books during the summer, do not have transportation to access a public library, and have limited resources available to their families. The RPS Lit Limo is meeting our students where they live. We are contributing to a more equitable society and helping to combat illiteracy by taking the books to them!

Judy Deichman has been the Coordinator of Library Services for Richmond Public Schools and the Lit Limo Library Lady since 2019. She is an active member of the American Association of School Librarians, American Library Association, Virginia Association of School Librarians, Virginia Library Association, and Virginia Society for Technology in Education firmly believing in the power of professional organizations.