Dolly comes to Kansas. Parton promotes reading program as it expands to JoCo, WyCo

Dolly Parton said she started a foundation to give free books to children because her father, though he was very smart, couldn’t read.

“That seemed to trouble him a lot so it troubled me that my daddy was troubled,” Parton, an internationally famous country music star, said. “I thought, ‘I’m gonna start a program and I’m gonna get my dad involved in this.”

Speaking to a crowd in Overland Park Monday, Parton said she told her father that millions of people didn’t know how to read. Prior to his death, Parton said, her father worked with her to get the program off the ground.

“I made him feel better about himself and he made me feel better because Daddy was smart and he could guide me and direct me in certain ways,” she said.

Parton visited Overland Park Monday to celebrate the full implementation of the program, the Imagination Library, in Kansas. Starting this summer every child in the state up to the age of five can receive a free book every month by mail.

During an on-stage interview with Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, Parton shared personal stories and discussed life as a celebrity and her other philanthropic and business efforts. She explained that her father couldn’t read because he didn’t have a chance to go to school. He married her mother when he was 17 and had 12 children by the time he was 37.

Kelly, who is Irish Catholic, quipped that with that many siblings Parton could be Irish.

“People always ask, they say ‘while you have 12 kids, your parents have 12 kids, you must be Catholic,’” responded Parton, who grew up in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee.

“I said, ‘No, we’re just horny hillbillies.’”

Parton ended the conversation asking Kelly how someone “so-soft spoken” had gotten into politics and performed two songs, “Try” and “Coat of Many Colors,” for the crowd at the Jewish Community Center’s White Theatre.

Imagination Library

Parton’s program started in Tennessee in 1995. In 2005, Pratt, Kansas, was the first community outside Tennessee to begin a local Imagination Library program.

Earlier this year, Kansas lawmakers approved $1.5 million in funds for Kelly’s Children’s Cabinet, which administers early childhood programs, to expand the Imagination Library. Prior to the expansion in July, Johnson and Wyandotte Counties were among 12 counties in the state that did not have universal access to the program. Last year, the Shawnee Mission Education Foundation began offering the program to Johnson County children within Shawnee Mission School District boundaries.

State Senate Minority Leader Dinah Sykes, a Lenexa Democrat, said she was excited to see the program expand to Johnson County families and believed they would benefit from the tips offered to parents in each book.

“There’s something about getting something in the mail and the excitement and wanting to share that with your child,” she said.

The program has grown by about 12,000 students in the past year, said Melissa Rooker, executive director of the Kansas Children’s Cabinet. Much of that has come through promotion over the summer as the program expands. State and local partners cover the cost of postage and books for Kansas children while Parton’s foundation manages all administrative and overhead costs.

Lawmakers and advocates hope the program will play a role in improving reading outcomes for Kansas students, which have been declining for more than a decade.

According to data from the Annie E Casey Foundation, Kansas’ reading proficiency rates have been consistently declining since 2011.

From 2011 to 2013, the percentage of fifth graders in the top three performance levels on reading assessments from 87.29% to 84.91%. In 2015 the state began calculating instead the reading proficiency among students between 3rd and 8th grade. In 2015, 79.62% of those students met the basic assessment level or above. In 2021 that number had dropped to 70%.

The drops in proficiency came on a backdrop of lawsuits alleging insufficient funding for Kansas’ K-12 schools immediately followed by COVID-19, which wreaked havoc on student achievement nationwide.

Leah Fliter, a lobbyist for the Kansas Association of School Boards, said districts are expecting to see scores improve when they are reported later this year.

“School funding has been phased back in and with COVID now hopefully out of the way,” Fliter said. “We’re going to start seeing some improvement.”

Similar challenges have been seen nationwide as questions have been raised about the efficacy of common methods used to teach reading.

Parton’s foundation hits on an area many see as a pathway toward improved outcomes for students, strong early childhood opportunities.

“You’ve got to start young to avoid problems later,” Kelly told reporters before the event. “This really levels that playing field so that every child everywhere, every family, will have access to books and with the emphasis on actually reading the book.”

State Sen. Renee Erickson, a Wichita Republican, said she was concerned about the state’s declining test scores despite increased funding for K-12 schools in recent years. She said she hoped expansion of Parton’s program would help with early intervention, but that it would only work if parents signed up.

“Hopefully with Dolly, herself, coming to the state, and getting some publicity around that, that will help families become aware of this opportunity,” Erickson said.

In addition to holding the celebration Monday, billboards promoting the non-profit are up around the state. Rooker said the children’s cabinet has plans to increase promotional work in the coming months.

Though the Imagination Library has been shown to have success in improving literacy in the areas it’s been implemented, Kansas advocates say it is a step toward better outcomes and not the solution.

John Wilson, president of Kansas Action for Children, said Kansas needs to look next to more substantial investment in the early childhood education system.

“Programs like the Imagination Library are critical and can be powerful tools in and of themselves,” Wilson said. “We undercut our investment in the Imagination Library if we don’t invest in other areas.”

This story was updated to reflect the program has been available in the Shawnee Mission School District since last year.