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An organization dedicated to connecting military families through reading is keeping students from falling behind over the summer.
United Through Reading is working to prevent the “summer slide,” where students, particularly younger ones, “slide” backwards in their academic achievement during summer break, which can have a snowball effect as children experience subsequent loss each year. This can be especially true for military children who are frequently relocated.
“Military children are more than likely leaving their school or leaving their geographic area, which can disadvantage them even more,” said United Through Reading CEO Tim Farrell. “We’ve seen through research that even up to a third of the gains from the previous year’s schooling can be lost.”
United Through Reading encourages young students to continue reading through the summer with incentives like reading contests through partnering libraries and has a “library on wheels” that distributes free children’s books to military families and serves as a mobile storage unit.
The organization has a presence on multiple military installations around the country, including Fort Belvoir.
“We’ve seen through research that the more robust a military family’s home library is, the higher likelihood that they’re gonna continue to have terrific literacy development and increase their and increase their academic development along the way,” Farrell said.
United Through Reading has also connected service members and veterans with their families by giving deployed service members the opportunity to record a story for their family at more than 400 recording locations worldwide, as well as on their mobile device with a secure reading app. Since its beginning in 1989, more than 3 million military family members have participated in the program.
Prior to being the CEO of United Through Reading, Farrell was one of the millions of family members who used United Through Reading with his own family while he was deployed. Farrell served in the Air Force for 23 years during Desert Shield, Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom
“I recorded stories through United Through Reading that helped me stay connected with my children and ease that burden on my wife,” Farrell said. “She kept up extraordinary reading routines for our kids while I was deployed, but sometimes they wanted to hear me and sometimes they wanted to see my face and hear my voice at story time.”
With summer here, Farrell believes the role parents play in encouraging their children to read can fill the seasonal educational gap and that reading for even just a few minutes a day can prevent the summer slide.
“We’ve been very very grateful to not only be part of connecting military families, but the research has shown that over our lifetime those reading habits developed while military family members are together and kept going while they’re separated,” Farrell said. “It has a positive effect on literacy development for that military child, and that has a positive effect on the entire family.”
