Cedar Rapids organizations work together to get books to teens in juvenile detention
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (KCRG) - A new program is helping get books to teenagers in custody at Linn County Juvenile Detention and Diversion Services.
Whether they’re in the facility briefly, or for a long time, the teens are picking up skills they can carry forward.
“You know we have kids that carry one, two, three books around,” Dan Williams, the assistant director at the Linn County Juvenile Detention Center, said.
Fresh Start Ministries is working with the Cedar Rapids Public Library to make the program possible. It’s called “Read Woke: Be Heard.“ Carl Rush, an independent contractor for Fresh Start Ministries and the chaplain for the detention center, hopes the program can overcome the stigma of being behind in reading ability.
”We were having youth groups and some bible studies and I noticed that some of the youth were kind of embarrassed to participate because of their reading level,” Rush told us.
The Cedar Rapids Public Library provides the books to the Linn County Juvenile Detention Center.
”These are kids that we desperately want to reach, ones who deserve our time, and deserve our attention, and deserve our support,” Kevin Delecki, programming manager at the library, said.
Those involved with the program have seen so much success from it that they’ve extended it to continue even longer than originally planned.
”You know it allows kids to have success, a lot of times our kids haven’t had a lot of success especially with education,” Williams said.
Not only are the incarcerated teenagers improving on literacy, but librarians have also been meeting with them to record their thoughts on the books. It’s an opportunity to have their voices heard by a wider audience, as the audio is shared anonymously in a podcast on YouTube.
“A lot of times they feel like they’ve been discarded, they’ve been thrown away, they’ve been left abandoned. But they do now know that there are other folks in the community that have a genuine concerned interest for them,” Rush said.
“I really didn’t know books could be, like, interesting. I didn’t know it could be like fun to read, like it was fun to read the book,” one of the teens said on the podcast.
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