The Caitlin Clark Foundation has announced an exciting partnership with Scholastic that includes a donation of 22,000 new books to her charitable organization.
The initiative is part of Scholastic’s United States of Readers program, launched in September 2021, which aims to address literacy and book inequity for students in under-resourced schools across the country.
The donated books will serve a wide range of reading levels, from pre-kindergarten to eighth grade, and will be distributed to schools, children’s hospitals, and non-profits, with a special emphasis on Clark‘s home state of Iowa.
Scholastic‘s national literacy initiative seeks to make a measurable impact on early reading access, an area that has been historically underserved, according to the company’s news release.
Caitlin Clark’s passion for literacy
Clark, a 23-year-old basketball star, reflected on how her love of reading began during her childhood.
“Reading and education have always been hugely important in my life. I remember picking out the books from the Scholastic flyer and how empowering that was for me as a child, and how motivated I was to read,” Clark shared in the release.
Her foundation’s collaboration with Scholastic is a personal mission to inspire a love of reading in children.
“I want to help kids have the same experience, to develop their reading skills and open their imaginations to dream big. I am thrilled that my foundation will support reading as Literacy Champions by collaborating with Scholastic and the United States of Readers,” she said.
The partnership comes at a critical time when literacy rates in the U.S. are on the decline.
Scholastic’s 2022 Kids & Family Reading Report revealed that the percentage of children aged 6-17 who read regularly (five to seven days a week) dropped from 37 percent in 2010 to 28 percent in 2022. The COVID-19 pandemic, which increased reliance on screens for education, compounded this issue.
In 2022, the Reading is Fundamental organization reported that 34 percent of children entering kindergarten lacked basic language skills, while 67 percent of fourth graders read at or below a basic level.
The National Literacy Institute found that 40 percent of U.S. students cannot read at a basic level-a statistic that highlights the scale of the literacy crisis.
