Elias and Patricia Austin after a visit to Richmond Public Schools' Lit Limo
On a blazing hot day in August, Patricia Austin brings her son Elias to the Northside Family YMCA to check out the Lit Limo, a new Richmond Public Schools initiative designed to help kids build at-home libraries and boost their reading skills.
Patricia and Elias climb onto the Limo, a former school bus wrapped in black vinyl and decorated in green cursive. While Elias collects the books he wants — one on whales, one on penguins and one about St. Francis of Assisi — RPS Instructional Specialist Judy Deichmann goes into the Y to let day care center employees know the bus has arrived.
Soon, Elias is joined by a dozen more children, who, with hands sanitized and masks in place, swarm the boxes of books, scrambling over “Scooby-Doo” and “Spider-Man” and, upon emerging from the bus, happily show off their loot.
“We’re new to the area, and this is our first time coming out to the Lit Limo,” Patricia says. “We’ll definitely be back next week.”
The Lit Limo carries new and gently used books on a weekly route through the Richmond Public Schools district. RPS staff members drive the bus, and local librarians and volunteers assist with book distribution.
At each stop, the radio blasts cheerful pop music as staff wave cheerfully and welcome children and parents. At the Y, they jam to Harry Styles’ “Watermelon Sugar.”
The Lit Limo at the Northside Family YMCA
“The Lit Limo is one of our key strategies for bringing literacy into our communities,” says Autumn Nabors, RPS director of curriculum and instruction and a project contributor. “We don’t want kids to think, ‘Oh, I have to read’ — instead, we want them to think, ‘Oh, I get to read.’ We want to create a culture of literacy in our city. Our goal is to have every student reading on grade level by the third grade.”
Planning for the project began in November, well before the onset of COVID-19. With the arrival of the pandemic, it has become more crucial than ever. What was originally intended as a summer project will now become, out of necessity, an educational aid on wheels. Throughout the fall, the Lit Limo will be on the road five days a week, making three stops for each of the 25 elementary schools in the district. Services provided will include small-group library lessons, read-alouds, homework help and assistance with Google Chromebooks, which will be provided to students to facilitate virtual learning.
The right side of the bus is filled with books in English, the left side with books in Spanish. Both fiction and nonfiction titles are included, and the reading levels go from board books for toddlers to young adult novels.
A unique feature of the Lit Limo is that students do not have to return the books they select.
RPS Instructional Specialist Judy Deichmann aboard the Lit Limo
Deichmann started a similar project five years ago in her previous school district in Nottoway County. When she joined RPS last September, she suggested RPS do the same. Deichmann was added to the committee for the district’s literacy plan, and the Lit Limo program was incorporated into the Dreams4RPS initiative, a five-year plan to improve education in the city.
“Every year, there are kids who don’t read in the summer, who don’t have access to books at all,” Deichmann says. “[The Lit Limo] was one of our action plan steps to address that.”
Things started to come together over the winter when Ted Robertson, owner of the Goddard School of Midlothian, donated the school bus. Funds for the Dreams4RPS initiative were used to procure the initial inventory of books. RPS is also accepting book donations.
“It allows us to keep reaching out to our students, which is even more critical now than it was upon inception,” Deichmann says.
So far, the Lit Limo has been a success — more than 100 students have visited the bus each day since it was launched on July 20. “This is a way to bring the community together face to face,” Nabors says. “Times are stressful right now, but the Lit Limo has been a beacon of hope. We want kids to have books worthy of their beautiful brains.”
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