free libraries

June 21, 2021

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Gloversville Enlarged School District partners with public and private entities to launch an early learning program.

  The Gloversville Enlarged School District (GESD), with the help of partners Nathan Littauer Hospital, the City of Gloversville, The Fulton County Center for Regional Growth, the Gloversville Free Library, Brown’s Ford, the Micropolis Development Group, Townsend Leather,  and the Gloversville Merchants Association Corporation, is reaching out to the community with an innovative new program to reach children before they enter school and equip them with skills to help them reach their potential.

  The message starts with parents of babies born at Nathan Littauer Hospital, who will receive information on the importance of talking, reading, and singing with their newborns. Research has shown that parents and caregivers who talk, read, and sing to their newborns and young children each day have children that become stronger readers and bond more with their families. Decades of research show that brains develop the most rapidly in the first years of life when 700 to 1,000 new neural connections form every second.  Babies and young children who aren’t regularly talked to, read to, and sung develop a word gap that makes doing well in school less likely.

  The message will be reinforced at pediatrician visits, visits to downtown businesses where posters with ideas on how to talk to your children will be displayed, and on local busses, thanks to free “Talking is Teaching” posters and bus cards that are available through “Talking is Teaching”, an initiative of the Clinton Foundation.

  To make books available 24/7 eleven Little Free Libraries are being installed around the city; they are already up at the four elementary schools.  Parents and children can take a book, enjoy it at home for as long as they like, and return it or keep it when done. Most of The Little Free Libraries will be stocked and overseen by Gloversville Enlarged School District volunteers.  

 Anyone interested in donating to the next phase of this community campaign, which is to create gift bags for newborns, print and install bus shelter advertising, and continue to stock and restock the Little Free Libraries is asked to send their tax-deductible check to Cather Meher, at 234 Lincoln Avenue, Gloversville, New York.