Students at the Westminster Community Charter School in Buffalo are encouraging reading across their community. In this Focus on Education report, WBFO'S Eileen Buckley says the 8th grade class unveiled a "small library" they constructed to share books with the community.
"Every night before I go to sleep, I read my favorite book."
8th graders creatively rewrote the lyrics to the Michael Jackson song The Girl Is Mine by replacing the word girl with book.
"The doggone book is mine."
It's designed to promote reading in the 14215- Zip code where Westminster School is located in the Kensington-Bailey neighborhood of the city's east side.
Read to Success has already designated the area a "literacy zone" in an effort to address a high need for improving the literacy rate.
55 Westminster 8th graders decided to be a part of that challenge. As a way of saying good bye to their grade school as they graduate, the constructed a small book stand that will supply books to the public to encourage reading.
"For years to go on -- we can come back and see something we put on the ground and it's still here and improving. It also brought all the eighth graders together. We're all different and sometimes our personalities fight back at each other, but the project helped us get along. It helped us come together. We all are creative in our own ways," said several 8th graders when asked about the project.
School principal Dr. Ayinde Rudolph is proud his students who wanted to help tackle the high illiteracy rate.
"So they wanted to do something about it. They wanted to make sure that they encourage kids to read. When they said they wanted to create a small library -- I was all for it. I was real excited and the point was let's figure out how we can do it," said Rudolph.
Westminster is part of Buffalo Promise Neighborhood which seeks to improve school performance. Yvonne Minor-Ragan is president of the organization.
Student joins reading invasion.
Credit WBFO News photo by Eileen Buckley
"Our goal is to just approach literacy any way we can and any interesting way we can so our children will just jump in and take advantage of it," said Minor-Ragan.
The event wrapped up with a "reading invasion” by the entire school. Each student quietly read a book on the school playground for about 30-minutes to encourage reading.