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KSBY celebrates National Reading Day with book distribution, read along

book photo.PNG
Posted at 5:49 PM, Jan 21, 2021
and last updated 2021-01-22 13:15:37-05

National Reading Day is this Saturday, Jan. 23, and this week KSBY is celebrating by giving books to Central Coast students in need.

This giveaway is a culmination of the Scripps Howard Foundation's 2020 "If You Give A Child A Book..." campaign, where we asked our audience for help.

Thanks to your contributions last September, as well as those from employees here at KSBY, we raised over $30,000. At approximately $2.50 a book, that means we can give just over 6,000 brand new books to Central Coast students.

Since so much money was raised, KSBY was able to handpick not just one, but two schools to provide with brand new books at two different times of the year.

Arellanes Elementary School in Santa Maria and Oceano Elementary School received a portion of their books on Wednesday.

In total, Arellanes received 1,311 books and Oceano received 1,715 books. Each student was able to go home with four new books. The rest of the books will be distributed in May so students will have new books to read over the summer.

Normally these books would be handed out on National Reading Day, but given the circumstances of the pandemic, the schools did the book distribution by a drive-thru.

To show our appreciation and to help Central Coast families celebrate National Reading Day with their kids, our Daybreak team put together a video of them reading together "Say Something" by Peter H. Reynolds.

You can watch the full video at this link: https://fb.watch/39Y7K2uX9B/

According to Scholastic, every book generates approximately 180 reading minutes for kids. With the dollar amounts our audience helped raise during the campaign, that's about 154,000 minutes of reading time for these local students.

Below you can find our previous coverage from September when the campaign first began including local statistics on children and reading.