New Milford Intern Describes HOME Project for Building Foundations and Dreams
Adam: Should I read the dedication to you?
To all of the children who know that living with your family and the love you receive from them is much more important than the size of your home;
Amaya: My name is Amaya Nina, and I am at the port of New York today waiting for the delivery of Adam Leitman Bailey’s new book Home.
Adam will be sending donations of these books to low-income areas and nearly all New York City Public Libraries as well as libraries in Bergen County, New Jersey.
My role in this project was researching low-income areas and finding different schools and libraries that would receive the book. So, basically I went on the website of the New York Department of Education. I looked up a ranking of all schools in New York City. I found that typically the schools that are ranked lower are also in low-income areas. So, there is a correlation between low-income areas and falling test scores. After using the New York Department of Education’s website, I researched into low-performing schools further, which most low-performing schools were also low-income schools. Under-privileged students for the most part don’t have the resources necessary to succeed in their education, so one of our aims through donating Home is to provide them with such resources.
We will be sending the books to different special education preschools, therapeutic preschools, head-start organizations, Goodwill, Salvation Army, and several other organizations. One example of organizations that we are donating these books to takes part in a program known as the Reading Education Assistance Dogs, where therapy dogs are paired with children who have difficulty reading in hopes that reading to dogs will be less stressful to them and will help advance their education. This program also provides children with the materials to read, and we are very happy to be a part of this process.
One of the best ways to help children who have speech impediments is to encourage them to read, so we are hoping that by donating these books to therapeutic preschools, we will also be helping students with speech impediments speak more freely.
There is a much larger percentage of under-privileged children than we know about and providing children with these materials to read is one of the first steps needed to improve our community.