News Release

RiverKings Will Honor Accelerated Reader Achievers
 

Hernando, Nov 5, 2002 - For some children, finishing a book that contains multiple chapters is something they do twice a week. For others, it’s the achievement of a lifetime. On Nov. 8, about 200 of those children who have labored and toiled to earn high points in DeSoto County Schools’ Accelerated Reader program will be honored at a special RiverKings game.
Gov. Ronnie Musgrove will attend a pre-game ceremony of congratulations for the children and their parents in the DeSoto Civic Center Theater. The governor will present the honorees with a certificate of achievement and free ticket for themselves and one parent to attend the game at 7 p.m. During the game, the children will be asked to stand and receive recognition. The game will also serve as a fundraiser for school groups, who will sell normally-priced $10 tickets at a discount and keep a portion of the proceeds for their organizations.
“Teachers have found that the Accelerated Reader program gets children motivated and excited about learning,” said DeSoto County Schools Community Relations Coordinator Riki Jackson. “It makes reading fun and they learn along the way. The success rate has been phenomenal. Some children are increasing their reading levels one and two grade levels during a year. The incentives, the pats on the back, motivate them to continue. That’s a critical component of that program.”
Strangely enough, one major reason the schools instituted the Accelerated Reader program was because of direct efforts on the part of RiverKings President Robin Grindstaff Costa. Costa also serves as President of The Maddox Foundation, a non-profit organization that she headquartered in Nashville until three years ago. Costa said her daughter, Kelsey, had been reading a book a day at her Nashville school, which used the Accelerated Reader software. When she arrived in DeSoto County, that number dropped to one every two weeks.
Costa volunteered to help in her daughter’s book fair at her Hernando school. What she saw brought tears to her eyes. One child spent a great deal of time choosing a certain book, and then was turned away because he was 27 cents short.
“He broke my heart,” Costa said. “It occurred to me that Kelsey had the financial resources and a mother who had time to help her read. He might never have a chance to get that positive reinforcement, in the absence of a parent or another adult in his life encouraging him to do that.”
Costa took the boy by the hand and made a pact with him. She would make a commitment to buy him the book if he made a commitment to read the whole thing. She spent $100 that day, buying books for children who couldn’t afford them.
The solution that immediately leaped into Costa’s mind was the Accelerated Reader program. The program is computer software which sets up a comprehensive reading plan for students. The child takes a test before beginning the program to determine his reading level. The software chooses easy to hard books within that particular child’s reading level.
The child chooses one of the titles, reads the book, and then takes a quiz on the computer testing their comprehension of the book. If he passes, then he earns a prize, the worth of which is scaled in accordance to the difficulty of the book. At the end of the year, the child takes another test to see his improvement.
Costa decided to collect support to put the software in every DeSoto County classroom, which would also necessitate computers in those classrooms. She received help from Tom Pittman, publisher of The DeSoto Times Today, and $10,000 from Bob Pittman, then Chief Operating Officer of America Online.
Gov. Ronnie Musgrove happened to have campaigned on “A Computer in Every Classroom,” and on Dec. 20 of 2000, she met with Musgrove’s staff and talked about her idea. The next day Musgrove called her at 8 a.m. and said he would give her $20,000, and asked if he could adopt this program for his statewide iniative.
The day coincided with the birthday of the late Margaret Maddox, one of Costa’s beloved mentors and former managing trustee of the Maddox Foundation. The day had for many years been a gala event which Costa and Margaret’s husband, Dan, spent months planning while he and Margaret were alive.
“The governor told me that he just felt like it was a birthday present for someone,” Costa said. “I had been feeling sad and empty because I hadn’t done anything for Margaret’s birthday. That would have been the perfect thing for her birthday, because she loved children and so strongly supported education. I realized that I had been working on the project for several months for her birthday. I got off the phone and cried my eyes out. I could feel her smiling on me from heaven.”
The governor’s initiative will be done in December, and will have placed 12,000 computers—and Accelerated Reader software—in classrooms all over the state, making Mississippi the first state in the United States to provide computer access to every child in public school.
“I can feel God’s presence in my life and every single thing that I did with that project,” Costa said. “All this came together in four months. It had to be the hand of God. Truly, the project has been blessed, and I know it will be a blessing to the children of Mississippi.”