FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Friday, Sept. 29, 2017

Media Contact: John Guilfoil (City of Rochester)
Phone: 617-993-0003
Email: [email protected]

Media Contact: Josephine Djonovic (Scholastic)
Phone: 212-343-6876
Email: [email protected]

Rochester Middle School Named #1 in New Hampshire for Summer Reading

ROCHESTER — Superintendent Michael Hopkins is exceptionally pleased to announce that students in the Rochester Public Schools are “top of the class” in New Hampshire when it comes to reading!

Rochester Middle School students read for more than 300,000 minutes this summer, earning them the title of “Best in State” for New Hampshire in the 2017 Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge. The school will be featured in 2018 Scholastic Book of World Records and will receive a commemorative plaque and a celebration kit to commemorate the students’ summer reading achievements.

“I am incredibly proud of our Middle School students and faculty for becoming statewide reading leaders,” Superintendent Hopkins said. “The Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge is a vital program that keeps learning going all year and prevents regression between school years.”

This summer, children all 50 states, Washington, D.C., two U.S. territories and 14 countries read 138,399,392 million minutes in the 2017 Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge.

The complete list of “Best in State” schools is available at www.scholastic.com/summer.

School administrators credit the work of teachers and specialists during the year, for making reading fun and motivating students during the school year to read all summer.

“Students at Rochester Middle School were introduced to the Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge in May 2017 and were encouraged by their teachers to log in minutes almost as soon as the program started,” said Chris Evans, Reading Specialist at Rochester Middle School. “Getting students logged in and using the program before they left school for the summer and incentives such as pizza parties for the winning classes at each grade level contributed to our program’s success.”

The Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge is designed to help kids turn the “summer slide”—the learning loss which can occur over the summer months—into a “summer leap” by discovering the power and joy of reading for fun. This year’s theme, “Happy Camper: Take a Reading Adventure,” came to life featuring beloved Scholastic characters, including custom Dog Man illustrations from Dav Pilkey, bestselling author and illustrator of the Captain Underpants and Dog Man series and our Scholastic Summer Reading Global Ambassador. The program offered kids the chance to log their reading minutes to earn digital prizes as they completed weekly reading challenges, gaining access to 18 reading activities, including games, quizzes and videos based on popular children’s books. Parents and families also had access to free summer reading resources, including book lists across all age groups in both English and Spanish.

“Scholastic is immensely proud of the students who joined the 2017 Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge and read all summer long, taking their own reading adventures and logging more than 138 million minutes,” said Michael Haggen, Chief Academic Officer, Scholastic Education. “Thanks to the encouragement and support of their families, educators, public libraries and community organizations, these students have returned to school ready to learn and prepared for the current school year.”

2017 Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge highlights:

• Nearly 4,000 schools, libraries and community partners participated in this year’s Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge.
• Students from the U.S. and around the world read a whopping total of 138,399,392 minutes! That’s the fifth year in a row kids logged more than 100 million minutes.
• The top five U.S. states with the most summer reading minutes read by children are: Texas (28,468,135 reading minutes), Florida (10,243,733 reading minutes), Pennsylvania (7,967,560 reading minutes), Louisiana (7,782,666 minutes) and Massachusetts (7,275,762 reading minutes).
• For the second year in a row, Scholastic sent two traveling Summer Reading Road Trip RVs across the U.S. to highlight the importance of summer reading and host reading festivals for kids and families in 50 cities. The RVs journeyed more than 10,000 miles from May through July and featured bestselling Scholastic authors and reading activities.
• Three U.S. Governors and 42 Gubernatorial Spouses and 1 Lt. Governor signed on as Reading Ambassadors to help spread the message to kids in their respective states and territories about the importance of reading during the summer months. Scholastic donated 500 books to the school of each Reading Ambassador’s choice (for a total of 23,000 books), and many of the Ambassadors hosted reading events at these schools.  

For more information about Scholastic and the Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge, please visit mediaroom.scholastic.com/SummerReadingChallenge.

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