Dolly Parton is being remembered not just for her hooks and her looks \u2013 but for her books.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Queen of Country Music\u2019s \u201cImagination Library\u201d program sends out a book each month to kids aged 0 to 5 across the United States and four other countries. Parton died last week, but New York had already doubled down on the program months ago, and is administering $1 million in grants<\/a> through the Office of Children and Family Services to sign kids up and distribute the books on the local level.<\/p>\n \u201cWe value the science here in New York state,\u201d OCFS Commissioner DaMia Harris-Madden said. \u201cWe know that early exposure to language and reading and books are really essential for the healthy development of our children and their brain development.\u201d<\/p>\n Dolly Parton\u2019s Imagination Library selects the books and sends them out, but requires local partners to cover the costs. OCFS already awarded more than $600,000 this year in grants to nonprofits, libraries and school districts, which Harris-Madden said would send books to more than 170,000 kids in the state. There\u2019s another $400,000 to award, and the agency is accepting solicitations of interest<\/a> through Sept. 28, focusing on nonprofits in New York City.<\/p>\n The funding is well short of the $3.5 million<\/a>, or even $7 million<\/a> that some proponents sought to make the program go truly statewide. But New York\u2019s $1 million investment comes at a time when several other states have pulled back funding<\/a> and sought private philanthropy to fill the gap.<\/p>\n \u201cDolly\u2019s program really does help to get to some of the marginalized children \u2026 where we want to close the achievement gap,\u201d Harris-Madden said. \u201cSo I\u2019m a fan of both of her music, her acting and what she\u2019s doing for the community.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dolly Parton is being remembered not just for her hooks and her looks \u2013 but for her books.\u00a0…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":334129,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[67,9,11,10,49,51,50,20709],"class_list":["post-334128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-education","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-new-york-state","tag-new-york-state-headlines","tag-new-york-state-news","tag-nyn-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=334128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334128\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/334129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=334128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=334128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=334128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}