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» Family Literacy
  - YonkersReads!
  - Family Story Power
» College Access
» Community Engagement

Why is YonkersReads! so important?

With 75% of families in the school district living at or below the poverty line, many homes do not have access to a constant flow of books. Research shows that:

  • In middle income neighborhoods, the ratio of books per child is 13 to 1, in low-income neighborhoods, the ratio is 1 age-appropriate book for every 300 children.
  • Children from low-income families have been exposed to an average of only 25 hours of one-on-one reading time compared to an average of 1,000 to 1,700 hours for children from middle-class families.
  • Regular reading out loud to children will produce significant gains in reading comprehension, vocabulary, and the decoding of words and will increase their desire to read independently.
  • The more types of reading material there are in the home, the higher students in those homes score in reading proficiency.
  • On the national level, white children were more likely to have been read to in the past week (about 90%) than African-American children (75%) and Hispanic children (60%).

Low Literacy Impacts Our Community

  • It is estimated that limited literacy skills cost business and tax payers $20 billion in lost wages, profits, and productivity annually.
  • Among adults at the lowest level of literacy proficiency, 43% live in poverty. Among adults with strong literacy skills, only 4% live in poverty.
  • More than one million children drop out of school each year, costing the nation over $240 billion in lost earnings, forgone tax revenues, and expenditures for social services.
  • American business currently spends more than $60 billion each year on employee training, much of that for remedial reading, writing, and mathematics.
  • Annual health care costs in the U.S. are four times higher for individuals with low literacy skills than they are for individuals with high level literacy skills.
  • There is a direct link between literacy skill level and youth and adult crime and incarceration. 95.3% of DOC inmates function at the lowest levels in math skills, and 69.42% perform at the lowest levels in reading skills—more than triple the rate of the general population.

　

　

 

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