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Back to School: Starting a new year with Raising A Reader MA by Sara Pollock DeMedeiros

Every year thousands of durable children's books are delivered to Raising A Reader MA sites to ensure the red bag book rotation program is implemented with the highest quality standards.

It’s September, the busiest time of year for Raising A Reader MA’s program staff. While we are up and running year round, many of our partners operate on an academic year schedule, which means that September is filled with meetings, staff trainings, family orientations, and lots and lots of new books!

Our program team focuses its efforts this time of year on making sure that we have a strong foundation for the rest of the year. What does this mean?

At the implementation level, September means training the staff employed by our implementation partners. New partners go through an orientation about early literacy and brain development, Dialogic Reading, and the logistics of our signature red bag book rotation program. Returning partners meet together to discuss best practices and plans for the upcoming months, including how they will engage parents directly and what Raising A Reader MA can do to support these efforts. In addition to participating in trainings and planning meetings, implementers (teachers, home visitors, etc.) also receive their books and red bags for the year. Refresher materials fill in the gaps of missing and damaged items for veteran partners, and new materials come by the truckload to get our new partners ready to go. Raising A Reader MA’s program staff members organize all these materials for our partners to make sure the bag rotations start as smoothly as possible. Sometimes it’s a nice break to sit down surrounded by books and sort for a few hours!

At the parent level, September means doing everything we can to make sure that parents are prepared for a successful Raising A Reader MA year. The first weeks of the school year are filled with open houses and orientations; our partners often give us time at these important meetings to introduce the red bags and let the parents know to expect a new one each week. We give some tips for sharing the books, and start to recruit parents to attend our more in depth workshops that will be starting soon. Parent Ambassadors, “graduates” of our program who are trained to support Raising A Reader MA in their community, provide significant assistance in these early outreach efforts.

All of our implementation and parent work is organized around a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) we sign with each partner in September. This document outlines the services we will deliver to support the development of family reading routines, and what we hope they will do in turn to maintain a strong partnership. The resigning of the MOA offer an opportunity for Raising A Reader MA’s staff and our partner staff to review the previous year, and discuss goals for moving forward. Perhaps most importantly, we use this time to set strategies for engaging parents by answering questions like when and where will parent workshops be held and how will we work together to ensure parent attendance?

Our program staff is certainly in overdrive in the early fall. Check out our back to school schedule to see where you can find them in Brockton, Chelsea, Everett, Lawrence, Lowell, Malden, Medford, Revere and Springfield during this exciting time of year!