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Frequently
Asked Questions
What is Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library?
Does it cost anything to receive the books?
Do I have to be low income to participate?
It’s so generous for Dolly Parton to
provide these books!
Will I get junk mail if I sign my child up?
Does my child’s book get forwarded if we
move?
Why is this offered only to
Middletown
children?
I have a
Middletown
address in
Madison
Township
or
Monroe, but your online registration accepted my information. Will my
child receive books?
I can't get the online
registration system to work. What's wrong?
I signed my child up weeks ago and haven’t
received a book. Why?
My book arrived early in the month last month
but now it’s mid-month and it hasn’t come yet. Why?
I have two children in my home registered and
the first one’s book has come but not the second one. Why?
Can you tell me what books will be sent next month?
What can I do other than just read to my
child with the books?
Why is reading to my baby important?
How many children are in
Middletown’s Imagination Library?
What
is Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library?
It is an international early childhood
literacy program operating in 1,100 communities across the
U.S.,
Canada, and
Great Britain. It provides one free, expert-selected, age-appropriate book
every month mailed directly to the home of any child in those communities from birth up until
their fifth birthday to help prepare them for kindergarten. Dolly
Parton, inspired by her own father’s lifelong inability to read,
created the program for children in her native
Sevier County,
Tennessee, in 1995. By 1999, word of its success had spread and other
cities asked to participate, so her
Dollywood Foundation
began allowing other communities to start using its model. Today,
it sends out books to more than 500,000 children every month and
has distributed over 20 million books since inception. The first
book every child receives is “The Little Engine That Could”
and the last book is “Look Out Kindergarten, Here I Come” on
his or her fifth birthday. For the rest of the child’s
enrollment, the book each month is chosen by birth year, so all
children born in 2009 receive Book A, all children born in 2008
receive Book B, and so on.
Does
it cost anything to receive the books?
No. The program is offered absolutely free to
all parents in a participating community. These books are a gift to your
child.
Do I
have to be low income to participate?
No. The program is offered to all children in
a participating community without consideration of income. The
goal is to allow all children to enter kindergarten with the
shared experience of the same 60 books as an equalizing factor
regardless of income or neighborhood or family situation. This not
only is something recognized by early childhood education experts
as important for children to experience, but it was also a
requirement placed on the program by its founder in response to
her own memories of the stigma of being singled out for special
programs as a child due to her family’s poverty.
It’s
so generous for Dolly Parton to provide these books!
Actually, while her foundation covers the administrative costs
for the program (convening the selection committee to choose the
books, maintaining the database of participating children,
negotiating discounted book rates with the publisher, coordinating
the monthly mailing, etc.), she does not pay for the actual books
sent to local children. That falls to local sponsors, who provide
the cost of book purchases and postage. Information on
Middletown’s sponsors, led by the Middletown Community Foundation, is
available here. You may also
make a tax-deductible donation here to support the program in
Middletown, which costs about $28 per year to send 12 books to a local
child.
Will I
get junk mail if I sign my child up?
No. Imagination Library policies prohibit us
from using your information for any purpose that is not directly
related to the Imagination Library. You may receive invitations to
an Imagination Library event we host or a similar offering in the
community that we feel parents would be interested in attending,
and we might send you a survey once or twice a year (which we hope
you will return to us so we know how we’re doing!). We also
mailed a reading tips DVD to parents in the program thanks to the
Middletown Public Library, TV Middletown and United Way of Greater
Cincinnati - Middletown Area, and about once a quarter we will
distribute copies of that DVD to all parents who registered for
the first time in that quarter. We are also planning a periodic
newsletter of reading information, but you will not receive junk mail as a result of
registering.
Does
my child’s book get forwarded if we move?
No. As the books are sent bulk mail, they are not forwarded. That is why it is very important for you to
contact us immediately with your new address so we may update the
mailing system (call 513-424-7369). However, undeliverable books
are returned to
the Middletown Community Foundation. If a book is returned to
us, we try to contact you at the phone number and/or e-mail you
provided with your registration to alert you so that you may come
pick it up and to ask for an updated address. If we are
unable to contact you or you do not pick up your child's book, we will
donate it to a charity in the Middletown area so that other children
may enjoy it.
Why is
this offered only to
Middletown
children?
Although the Middletown Community
Foundation’s service area includes the surrounding communities
(Monroe, Trenton, Franklin, Lemon Township, Madison Township), we
recognized that we did not have the financial resources to start
the program immediately in all of those areas because they simply
contain too many children for us to afford to serve. In addition, the number of children
entering kindergarten unprepared was much greater in
Middletown
than any of those surrounding areas. Therefore, we chose to start
our program in the
Middletown
City
School District
first. Our goal is to eventually serve the surrounding school
districts as well, but at present we only have funding to provide
the books for
Middletown
School District
children. More detail on why we chose to bring the program here is
available in a story on our website here.
The United Way of Greater Cincinnati - Middletown Area's Women
Living United announced in October that their signature project
will be raising funds to allow for the program's expansion to
the Madison, Monroe, and Edgewood school districts. We expect we
will begin registering children in those communities beginning
in 2011.
I have
a
Middletown
address in
Madison
Township
or
Monroe, but your online registration accepted my information. Will my
child receive books?
No. Until we announce that registration is
open to the surrounding communities, you may only register your child if you
live in the
Middletown
City
School District
(you may enter your address on the district’s website here to
determine if you are within its boundaries). Our online
registration system operates on a city/state/zip basis, so it will
let you enter your information even if your home is located
outside of the school district. Unfortunately, most homes in
surrounding districts (Monroe, Edgewood,
Madison, Lakota) have
Middletown
45044 or
Middletown
45042 addresses. In addition, a small segment of the city of
Middletown
in
Warren
County
has
Franklin
45005 addresses. Therefore, all three city/state/zip combinations
will be accepted by the online system even if you are located
outside of
Middletown
schools. However, we check each of those addresses before adding
them to the mailing list for the books, and if it falls outside of
the school district boundaries the registration is deleted and you
are notified of why.
I
can't get the online registration system to work. What's wrong?
Thanks to a Windows update to
Internet Explorer version 8, some people may have trouble getting
the online registration system to function properly. If that's the
case, you will see the "Agreement" page with the
"Accept terms of use" checkbox reload itself each time
you try to hit "Accept." If this occurs, please use an
alternate registration page here.
I
signed my child up weeks ago and haven’t received a book. Why?
The books are ordered one month in
advance, so it is possible that your child is not in the system
yet. For example, let's say the July book order is placed on June
9. If you registered your child on June 8, you would have made that list and
your book would have arrived in July, about four or five weeks later.
However, if you registered your child on June 11, you would have missed the
July order’s cut-off date and your child would be included in
the August order. If the August book arrives on August 20, that’s
a 10-week delay between when you registered and when the first
book came. Also, there may be a delay in receipt of your
registration form. If you mail your form directly to the
Middletown Community Foundation or use the online registration
process, we receive it immediately. If
another agency collects the form for you and forwards it to us,
there may be a slight delay in our receiving it to get your child
entered into the
system.
My
book arrived early in the month last month but now it’s
mid-month and it hasn’t come yet. Why?
The program ships more than 500,000 books
every month, so the time they arrive varies greatly depending on
when the books arrive at their
Tennessee
shipping location, how long it takes to address them, and then the
order in which they are sent to the post office for mailing.
Sometimes they can arrive the first week of the month and
sometimes it might be as late as the third or fourth week of the
month.
I have
two children in my home registered and the first one’s book has
come but not the second one. Why?
Again, because the program ships 500,000 books every month –
an endeavor that takes a considerable length of time to sort, label,
address, and mail each one – your first child’s book may have
been processed in the first books for that month and the second
child’s book processed in the last books for the month, so they
could arrive as many as two or three weeks apart.
Can
you tell me what books will be sent next month?
No. Although the
Dollywood Foundation plans which book will be sent each
month of the year, sometimes shipping
or printing delays cause a book that was planned for Month A to have to be sent out in
Month B instead. For that reason,
they do not release a list of books by month in advance. However,
once the books have started to be shipped, we do obtain a list of
the books for the month and post it here.
What
can I do other than just read to my child with the books?
That’s a wonderful question! Several
of the titles have activity sheets available on our website here
that you may use to engage your child with fun things to do with
the books. Even without an activity sheet, some things you can do
include talking about the illustrations in
the book, making up songs about the story, asking your child
questions about the pictures or about the story, or asking your child
to “read” the book to you by letting him or her make up a
story to go along with the pictures. You can do a lot more than
just "reading" when you’re reading!
Why is
reading to my baby important?
Research has shown that the first five years
– and especially the first three years – of life are among the
most important for proper brain development. This is the time when
their brains are growing faster than they will for the rest of
their lives, so they need proper stimulation to encourage proper growth. Even though you may think a three month old or six month
old might not be getting much out of reading, studies have shown
that a 3-year-old’s vocabulary is a direct result of the number
of words to which he or she has been exposed during those first
three years of life, and the level of a child’s vocabulary at age 3 also
correlates to his or her reading level in the third grade. In
simpler terms, the
amount of time you spend with your child exposing them to language
in the first three years is believed to have a direct result on
how well they will perform in elementary school several years
later! A report on the impact of the program on local families is
available
here.
How
many children are in
Middletown’s Imagination Library?
We currently have about 800
Middletown
children from all over the city enrolled in the program. Since
starting, already more than 200 have reached age 5 and
“graduated,” so we have touched the lives of more than 1,000
local children since our first Imagination Library books were
mailed to Middletown homes in January 2009! If your child is not registered,
sign up here!
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