Young winners earn prizes in the Covington Mayor’s Reading Challenge as 900 students read over 16,000 books.
There are a lot of ways to gauge success, but few are as infectious as Akeem Thompson’s wide, satisfied smile of achievement. Before Christmas break, Akeem told his mother that he’d entered the Covington Mayor’s Holiday Reading Challenge and that he was going to win.
The stakes were big – a brand new iPad.
“He wanted an iPad for Christmas,” said his mother, Kera Thompson, but that wasn’t in the budget.
True to his word – and thanks to a steely determination – Akeem, a second-grade student at Ninth District Elementary School, was among the five Reading Challenge grand-prize winners announced at this week’s Covington Board of Commissioners meeting.
“When I found out he’d won an iPad, I was overjoyed,” said Thompson. “It was meant to be.”
Other winners recognized at the meeting were:
• Melita Valle, a pre-K student at Biggs Early Childhood Education Center.
• Jaqueli Temaj Aguilar, a kindergarten student at John G. Carlisle Elementary School.
• Miguel Barcia Manon, a first-grade student at Glenn O. Swing Elementary School.
• Angelica Gomez Cordova, a third-grade student at John G. Carlisle Elementary School.
Each received their iPad and a basket brimming with prizes and were recognized and congratulated by Mayor Joe Meyer and City Commissioners Ron Washington, Tim Downing, Shannon Smith, and Michelle Williams.
“I want to thank the parents,” the mayor said. “There’s no greater gift than the gift of reading. It lays the foundation for their success.”
The challenge ran Nov. 21 to Dec. 31, 2021, and was open to all Covington students enrolled in the CleverKidsUniversity (ages 2 to 5) and Footsteps2Brilliance (ages 5 to 8) apps.
In addition to the grand-prize winners, a random raffle winner was selected each week of the seven-week challenge from the pool of students who were averaging at least 15 minutes a day, five days a week on the literacy apps.
Roughly 900 students actively participated in the reading challenge. Within a month, they’d read 9,597,704 words, 16,798 books, and played 42,042 skill-building games.
To provide a little context that speaks to the on-target trajectory of the reading challenge, last year students read more than 5.3 million words and almost 7,800 books and completed more than 18,000 skill-building games involving vocabulary and the like.
The challenge was offered through the Read Ready Covington (RRC) early childhood literacy program, which the City kicked off in November 2018 with help from a range of partnering organizations as a way to get the City’s youngest kids off to a better start in their school careers.
RRC’s foundation is the use of apps provided free for Covington parents that provide activities and reading exercises for kids and help parents introduce reading skills to their young children.
“Each of these children demonstrated persistence – sticking with something when it is hard or when they might want to be doing something else,” said Mary Kay Connolly, Covington’s Early Literacy Initiative Director. “Each of our winners showed persistence to keep themselves motivated during the Mayor’s Holiday Reading Challenge. Their job now is to continue their practice, and parents can help them with encouragement and participation themselves.”
Jennifer Williamson, who teaches grand-prize winner Melita Valle at Biggs Early Childhood Education Center, said she’s participated in the reading challenge ever since it’s been in existence. She’s seen its impact more than once.
“Melita [Valle] is actually my second winner that I’ve had in my classroom,” Williamson said.
Besides the use of the apps, Read Ready Covington also organizes regular literacy events in housing communities around Covington, solicits donations of books to give out, and has installed several sets of metal signs around the city displaying words beginning with the 26 letters of the alphabet that are “collected” by young children as part of a literacy scavenger hunt.
