Mayor Clem Seifert visits pre-kindergartners at the New Beginning day care center Tuesday.
Eric Williams was doing hard time.
Trapped in a room that would make a jail cell look roomy, the Henderson city manager called on his friends to get him out of trouble.
“I’m going to warn you upfront, I’m going to hit you up for a little money,” he told one phone-a-friend. “I’m trying to get myself out of jail at the moment.”
Williams is a free man today, having served his debt to the youngest segment of society by raising more than $2,000 on Time-Out Tuesday.
City Manager Eric Williams isn’t quite behind bars.
The city manager was one of 10 Hendersonians who submitted to the ultimate preschool punishment, timeout, as a fund-raiser for the latest project of the Franklin-Granville-Vance Partnership for Children, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library.
The Imagination Library is a project of the country music superstar’s Tennessee-based Dollywood Foundation. Embracing the idea that reading is the most fundamental element of success in school and thus in life, and that children’s best chance to become good readers starts with their parents reading to them, the program mails a free book a month to a child until age 5.
Educators locally and nationally emphasize the importance of starting kindergarten ready to learn to read, if not already reading. Many of the children who are behind at the start never catch up, and their struggles in school lead them to drop out as teenagers and often fall into crime. That scenario plagues Vance County, where an estimated one-third of children start kindergarten unprepared.
The FGV Partnership is joining the Imagination Library program to stop that downward spiral before it starts.
“We have to work on helping our families get resources and get reading,” said Garry Daeke, development coordinator for the FGV Partnership and organizer of Time-Out Tuesday. The local Smart Start agency will be the third in the state to join the Dollywood program, he said, including Person County.
The local agency will be responsible for signing up children, sending the database of names and addresses to the foundation each month, updating the information as families move and new children enroll, and distributing books that come back to the post office as undeliverable for any reason (such as a family moving away on short notice).
The FGV Partnership also must pay $27 a year, or $2.25 per book, for each child in the program. That’s about a third of the cost of the program, which the Dollywood Foundation estimates at $80 to $90 per child.
A child can enter the program at birth or any time before the fifth birthday and build a personal library of age-appropriate books before starting school. A family will be allowed to register as many children as it has who are young enough, and each will receive books.
Vance County had 3,280 children ages 4 and younger last year; the three counties covered by the FGV Partnership had about 10,000, Daeke said.
He said the FGV Partnership particularly wants to reach children who aren’t in day care, in the belief that children getting professional care also get exposure to books. To reach those families, the organization will set up enrollment stations at places such as the Health Department, the Department of Social Services and Maria Parham Medical Center.
There are no enrollment limits based on income or race. The child merely has to be young enough and live in the three counties served by the FGV Partnership, the local Smart Start agency. And a parent must sign an agreement to read the books to the child.
“That’s the leap-of-faith part,” Daeke said. The difficulty of proving that parents are doing their part and the long-term nature of the program’s positive effects make it unlikely that the FGV Partnership will be allowed to use state Smart Start money for the Imagination Library, he said.
That’s where Time-Out Tuesday came in. It was a way to launch local fund raising for the reading program and create awareness. Other kickoff fund-raisers will be held in Granville and Franklin counties, said David Irvine, the FGV Partnership’s kindergarten readiness coordinator.
Daeke said he hopes the seed money raised Tuesday will lead to grants from corporate and governmental sources.
He said the program is perfect for a collaboration of local agencies that address various family and child needs, and he hopes to get as many of those organizations together as possible at a meeting April 13 to involve them in the Imagination Library. Among those groups are the school system, the hospital, pediatricians and Jean Palamar’s nonprofit literacy group.
“We could get so many people involved,” Daeke said. “I just can’t wait to get enrollment sites up and see things going.”
No start date is set, but Tuesday’s fund-raiser made the launch a lot closer.
Daeke didn’t have final figures available, but he said it appeared that the event exceeded its $3,000 goal by more than $1,000. That means the 10 people who volunteered to spend up to an hour in timeout at one of three day care centers brought in enough money to pay for at least 150 Vance County children to participate in the program for one year.
The Time-Out 10 reported that no one they contacted turned them down, although there were some awkward moments. Williams, who spent days calling his list of 50 to 60 names, tried to talk Daily Dispatch Publisher James Edwards into a pledge Monday, only to learn that Edwards also was destined for timeout. Edwards then found out the hard way how thorough Williams had been: A few of his fund-raising targets reportedly told him they had already pledged to the program, even though Edwards had the first shift Tuesday at 9 a.m.
The Time-Out 10 — Williams, Edwards, Mayor Clem Seifert, City Council members John Wester and Mike Rainey, county Commissioners Tommy Hester and Deborah Brown, Embassy Square Foundation executive director Kathy Powell, reigning Chamber of Commerce Citizen of the Year Wayne Gray, and Eddie Ellington — served their time at New Beginning Child Care on Industry Drive, the Playhouse Child Care Center on Burwell Avenue or Great Beginnings Christian Child Care Center at South Henderson Pentecostal Holiness Church on Americal Road.
Irvine ferried people to and from Great Beginnings in a van lent by the day care center, and Daeke handled the chore in a Playhouse van for the people pulled in one at a time at that center. Partnership program coordinator Connie Ragland did the driving for the New Beginning crowd.
Powell served her time in a quiet corner of Lynn McCray’s class of 4- and 5-year-olds at New Beginning. Placed in timeout about 1 p.m., she caught the class during nap time and found the nine youngsters to be “as sweet as they could be.”
“I’m in timeout,” Kathy Powell tells a potential donor.
She said she exceeded her $300 goal. She used a pitch that emphasized how a mere $27 pledge could keep a child in new books for a year. And, of course, there was her own temporary plight: “I’m stuck in timeout.”
Seifert and Rainey got back from the National League of Cities conference in Washington on Tuesday afternoon, just in time to be placed in timeout. Rainey had the last shift at the Playhouse, under new director Kelly Stanley, and Seifert closed out the event at Naomi Heggie’s New Beginning.
The mayor used his time to visit with the children in McCray’s class instead of making phone calls.
“Some boys and girls don’t get to read,” Seifert said in explaining to the children why he was there. “You get to read every day.”
“I’m getting my kids ready for kindergarten,” said McCray, who demonstrated the children’s abilities to read the alphabet and recognize shapes as obscure as octagons and trapezoids.
In an echo of the Imagination Library’s goal of getting parents to read to their children, McCray will soon start giving out pre-kindergarten homework that will force parents and children to work and read together.
“I really want all of them to be reading by the time they start school,” McCray said.
On Tuesday the children got to listen to Seifert read the class’s choice of a book, “Lucas the Littlest Lizard” by Kathy Helidoniotis, with illustrations by Leonie Worthington.
While Seifert and Wester, who McCray said delighted her class with stories of how Heggie used to look after him, were among the star performers of the day, Williams was the champion fund-raiser.
From Great Beginnings director LuKrena Schoonover’s office, he worked the office phone and his cellphone to pile up pledges for the reading program, which he said addresses a fundamental need that has emerged as groups have formed to attack the roots of Vance County’s problems. One example is the unnamed working group on crime, which holds its third meeting this morning and discussed the problem of school readiness two weeks ago.
Williams said a few people he called had questions about how the program’s success would be measured, but all made pledges after he explained the idea and, in the case of an accountant, pointed out that the contributions are tax-deductible.
“It shows that people support this program,” Williams said, and it made his time in solitary confinement worthwhile.