07 Oct 2024 Kiwanis Club of Conway hosts annual Bookcase Project Banquet

The Kiwanis Club of Conway will host its annual banquet benefitting the Conway Bookcase Project from 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 12 at the Bob and Betty Courtway Middle School. Tickets are $25 each and include a barbeque buffet supper catered by Corky’s, live music by the Fat Soul Band and Keynote Speaker Kathy French of AR Kids Read will speak. To purchase a $25 ticket, or to sponsor a table for eight for $250, call 501.920.9429.

All proceeds are designated to build wooden bookcases for children. Attendees are encouraged to bring new or gently used books for 4- and 5-year-olds to donate. Monetary donations to the Conway Kiwanis Bookcase Project are also welcome. 

The Kiwanis Club took on the Conway Bookcase Project as a service activity in January 2020. It has been a perfect fit for Kiwanis, whose mission is to improve the world “one child and one community at a time.”

The goal of the Bookcase Project is to promote literacy at an early age. It does this by awarding personalized wooden bookcases and starter sets of books to 50 Head Start preschoolers annually. Each child’s name is engraved on a brass plate and affixed to the front of their bookcase. Since Jim Davidson of Conway founded the project in 2005, 1,000 children have received bookcases.

Richard Plotkin chairs the Conway Kiwanis Bookcase Project, supported by corporate partners Nabholz Construction, Centennial Bank, Conway Corp and Virco. Additional funds are raised from sponsors and ticket sales to an annual banquet. Volunteers from the Kiwanis Club and other service organizations contribute countless hours to the project.

“I am passionate about the Bookcase Project because the need is empirically demonstrated, and it must be met,” Plotkin said. “Educators, parents and the community must work together to ensure our children can read proficiently. Literacy is a cornerstone of their future.”

The primary source of books for the Bookcase Project is the Faulkner County Library, which fills the bookshelves with books received through community donations. This source is supplemented by donations from numerous supporters, including the Life 10 Sunday school class at Conway’s First Baptist Church, which buys a children’s Bible and a book of bedtime Bible stories for each recipient.

The Bookcase Project is one of numerous public- and private-sector initiatives launched to reverse a decline in reading performance in elementary students. The 2022-2023 assessment for Arkansas’s public-school students in grades 3 through 10 was the ACT Aspire test. The results showed that only one of every three third graders met a readiness benchmark in reading. 

It is difficult for students with lower-than-average reading achievement scores in third grade to close the gap as they progress through school, according to a special report published in 2010 by the Annie E. Casey Foundation titled “EARLY WARNING! Why Reading by the End of Third Grade Matters.”

The benefits of literacy are transformative, said Arnold Holtberg, a former educator and current consultant who lives in Hot Springs Village (Garland County). “At its core, reading involves decoding, analyzing and problem-solving,” Holtberg wrote as a guest columnist in the Sept. 3, 2023, edition of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.  “These skills are required for every imaginable occupation from store clerk to carpenter to plumber to lawyer to professor and more.”