Photo credit: FIRST 5 Santa Clara County
Due to a $35,000 grant from the First 5 of Santa Clara County, “a local public agency that distributes nearly $30 million in annual funding from California’s Proposition 10 Tobacco Tax,” a library card-activated vending machine might help kindergartners and pre-schoolers in North Sunnydale boost their literacy rates. The machine is a prototype piloted by First 5 to gauge the potential effectiveness, hopefully inspiring more around the area and in other cities as time goes on. As Mercury News reports, “41 percent of Santa Clara County third-graders are not reading at grade level,” and there exists “a gap in north Sunnyvale between the need and availability of early learning and literacy opportunities” that effectively stifles many attempts on behalf of the county to counteract its decreasing literacy rates.
Shelving 220 books, the machine is intended to “[reach] children where they are through books and rich literacy materials” to prepare them for academic success. No reports indicate this project’s success as of now, but certainly with the rise of kindle and other electronic reading services readily available at a fraction of the price, a $35,000 machine to disperse free books seems exorbitant and perhaps outdated. Only time will tell how these machines fare in Sunnydale and potentially beyond, but the question becomes whether library vending machines will be the educational resource en vogue for children of future generations
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