The summer slide isn’t a piece of playground equipment or even a toy at the local town pool.
While it sounds like something fun, it’s anything but that. Rather, the summer slide is something that parents need to fight against during these warm months.
The summer slide is the well-documented decrease in reading ability that occurs when kids don’t engage in learning over the summer. When children take a break from reading, their abilities recede and as that loss compounds over the years, some kids are left years behind their actual grade level.
To combat the summer slide, one community is looking to a bright yellow bicycle for answers. The city of Longmont, Colorado is launching a book-bicycle-centered outreach effort to try to reach kids whose parents don’t bring them to the library. Friends of the Longmont Library funded the $6,000 BookCycle that features a bubble machine and handle-mounted pinwheels, as well as a cargo hold for dozens of books and a Wi-Fi station that anyone can use.
Library employees will pedal the BookCycle to public events this summer, where they will host story times; they’ll also have the ability to make library cards on the spot. “We’re hoping the mobility will allow us to reach underserved areas and bring the books straight to them,” Elektra Greer, head of Longmont Library’s children and teens department, told Whitney Bryen of the Longmont Times-Call.
People in this Rocky Mountain community can expect to find the BookCycle at the farmer’s market, free public concerts, the First Friday Art Walk on Main Street, and many other events.
Now the librarians just need to learn to steer it — which can be difficult when the BookCycle is loaded up with books. So in preparation for pedaling season, the staff is taking lessons from Longmont Bicycles.
With any luck, they will return to the library from each of their outings with an empty BookCycle, leaving behind many kids with their noses buried in books.
MORE: What Looks Like A Birdhouse And Promotes Literacy?
Tag: Longmont
Brewers Fight Proposed Regulation That Would End Grain Recycling Initiatives
If you’re a lover of the brewsky, then Denver is the city for you.
The Mile High city brews more beer than any other American city, and the state of Colorado boasts over 140 microbreweries. So it probably won’t surprise beer lovers here in the “Napa of beer” that many brewers are using their drinks as forces for environmental and economic good, donating their spent grains — barley, hops, wheat and other grains that have been soaked in water during the beer-brewing process — to farmers who can use them to feed their livestock, instead of throwing them away.
Oskar Blues, a Longmont-based brewery, runs the Hops and Heifers program. In a process it calls “Farm to Cup,” the brewery grows hops on its own farm, uses the hops for brewing, feeds its cattle with the spent grains, and then uses the meat from these cows in burgers sold at its restaurant.
But newly proposed FDA rules threaten to disrupt innovative recycling programs such as this, forcing microbreweries to send the spent grains to landfills or else engage in a costly process of drying out the grains and packaging them to prevent anyone from touching them before they reach the farmers. For many small brewers, the cost of this would be too great and they’d be forced to choose the landfill option.
According to John Fryar of the Longmont Times-Call, Paul Gatza, who directs the Boulder-based 20,000-member strong Brewers Association, spoke with FDA officials who say they’ll change the rule before issuing new draft of the regulations this summer. “The wording in the original proposed rules was pretty bad,” Gatza said. He estimates that the new rule would cost breweries $5 more per barrel to process the grains before donating or selling them to farmers, potentially putting many small brewers out of the recycling business. That would have been a shame, as a recent Brewers Association survey found that members reuse 90 percent of their spent grains.
FDA spokeswoman Juli Putnam told Fryar that they’ve gone back to the drawing board, rewriting some of the language in the regulation in a way that will hopefully allow this beer positivity cycle to continue. Now that’s good news worth lifting a beer over.
MORE: His Family Lost its Farm. Now He’s Making Sure No One Else in His Community Suffers the Same Fate.
Watch the One Incredible Spontaneous Act That Helped a Colorado Community in Need
A song can do a lot more than just raise spirits; it can raise cash too. The suburban community of Longmont in Northern Colorado is still recovering from devastating floods that swept through in September. But some much-needed help is now on the way, thanks to the musical creativity of OUR Center, an area nonprofit that provides emergency services to local residents in need. Organizers from the center, along with members of the St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, wanted to try something different to solicit donations for its ongoing relief efforts. So, on a sunny day in December, the group staged a surprise flash mob in a local grocery store, Lucky’s Market, with participants all singing “Help” by the Beatles. The sing-along included the church choir, singers from the Rocky Mountain Center for Music Arts and even the Silver Creek High School drum line. “It was just a creative way to help [the OUR Center] reach new donors and build awareness and gather what they really need — cash,” Phil Caragol, one of the flash mob organizers, told the Longmont Times-Call. Local filmmaker Payton Pearson was on hand to capture the whole thing on video, which you can watch above. So far, the singing spectacle seems to have worked wonders. The OUR Center reports that $10,000 in donations can be traced directly to the video, while more than $30,000 has been donated in less than a month — a drastic increase from the same time last year. That’s a whole lot of “help” for a community that needs it.
MORE: Community Building Through … Baking?