Guilford County Students Will Use Their Imagination to Travel Across the Country

Guilford County students in grades K-12 are participating in a new literacy initiative called Roadmap 2 Reading. The program began last week and encourages students to read outside of the classroom for 20 minutes a night.

“Each minute read will count as one mile traveled. Each individual student will strive to read 3,114 minutes which covers 3,114 miles from coast to coast starting right here at Cape Hatteras, North Carolina and traveling across the country to San Francisco, California,” says Tammy Gruer, district media technology specialist for Guilford County Schools.

Gruer says research shows that children who read books for just 20 minutes a day perform better in school and in the workplace.

She says Guilford County School officials are looking at several ways to help students track and monitor their progress.

“Some of the things we have discussed are creating a widget on the schools web page that will track their mileage as a school, and you can look at it and see their car go across the country. Another is a type of chart that will show how far students have gone on the web page. Some schools are looking at putting up a map in their school or in their community,” says Gruer.

The district's overall progress will be calculated by dividing the total number of minutes read by all 72,500 students in the school system.

The final results of the Roadmap 2 Reading program will be announced at the next Guilford County State of Our Schools event in January 2014.