But Why?

Summer Read-at-Home Program Survey Results

During the summer reading program we have parents comment about the program on a survey. They are always interesting to read and since they are anonymous I cannot give any feed back to the individual parents, which is sometimes frustrating. So I thought that I would comment on some of the things that our parents said on the surveys.

Let me just say that prize days went very well and every child that I helped on prize day seemed genuinely excited by the books, toys and coupons that they received. We have had about 40% of our participants pick up their prizes. If you still have a summer reading booklet and want to turn it in for prizes, hurry, they must be redeemed by August 31st!

Parent comment #1: Have more weekly prize drawing winners.
Librarian reply #1: We wish that each and every child could win a $50.00 KNEX set, however, our budget limits what we can do. Our prize drawing items ranged in price from $8-50 and we had a total of 12 winners, in 3 different age catergories each week. We even had an additional 10 winners the final 2 weeks. That's 116 drawing winners! or about 25%. I've been known to say it before and I'll say it again, it's not really about the prizes, but getting the kids to read that matters. A solution could be that if Mom wants to she could buy a prize for her child and if the child gets their reading done they "win" Mom's special prize.

Parent comment #2: We want prizes each week instead of waiting until the end.
Librarian reply #2: I also wish that each week I could spend 20 hours per week handing out prizes, what af fun job that would be! Ten years ago when I started running this program we had a specific day that the children came in and turned in their reading minutes for the week. It was extremely limiting to staff schedules, working parents and families on vacation. We did away with this type of reward system because parents said it was too hard to come in on a specific day each week.

Parent comment #3: We missed the small prizes that they could get for their coloring pages.
Librarian reply #3: I missed them also, we may try and implement them again next year. It was so fun to see how the children did and to post them on the bulletin board for everyone to see. We made the choice to not have the prizes available during the summer because of the staff time involved in giving them out. When we have over 500 children coming in to get a prize, it can take hours of staff time, if each child takes one minute (and some will take much, much longer) to choose their prize it would be more than one full-time staff members day, or 8 hours. We were busier than ever this year, so staff time was a premimum.

Parent comment #4: We hated the way the booklet was broken up by weeks this year. This divided format was too limiting.
Parent comment #5: I really appreciated the fact that you broke it down by weeks. It didn't seem so daunting to get each page filled with enough days.
Librarian reply #4 & #5: This is so often the case, someone loves a change we make and someone else hates it. We implemented the dates so that parents and kids would have a visual of how much they had done that week, and how much they had left to do. We did try and let parents know that if kids missed a few dates that they could at anytime go back and read the 20 minutes for that day. I guess some parents didn't know that they could do that. We even had built in days off, only 5 days per week were required to complete the week.

Parent comment #6: We want the points system again, so we can earn bigger prizes like T-Shirts.
Librarian reply #6: The points system was lots of fun, the more you read the more you earned and if you read a lot you could win T-Shirts and other cool stuff. Two things prompted us to change from that format. The first was the parents themselves, too hard to add up and keep track of all those points! If you have more than a couple of kids it was indeed and arduous task. The second was the cost, T-Shirts cost $6, prize books cost between $1.29 and $3.50. Most kids wanted to earn more than one prize, so we opted for the more, less-expensive option. The way to get more expensive prizes would be to raise the registration cost, something that I am not willing to do.

Parent comment #7: Why end in July? There is still a lot of summer left!
Librarian comment #7: We have had this comment many times over the years. There are a few good reasons behind our schedule choices. First is that after 8 weeks many children lose interest. It shows in the number of registered participants versus the number who actually sign up to come in for the prizes at the end. A solution? Keep going with a home version, Mom's can get some prizes and have the kids read for them. Second is once again staff time, after 8 weeks devoted to the program, (more if you count all the prep time setting up and printing the booklets) the librarians have other library tasks to accomplish. Another reason we end in July is so that staff who are restricted from taking vacation days during the program will have time to take their kids on vacation before summer ends.

Whew! That's a lot and there are lots of others I wish I could comment on. I hope that these explantions help and don't just sound like justifications. We really spend hours trying to set up the best program possible that will work for the most people possible, and not over burden the staff as they try and keep the library running smoothly. Thanks for taking the time to fill out the surveys! We really do read and use them to make the program better.

Keep reading!
Michele, Children's Librarian