Educators, librarians and community leaders gathered at a literacy summit Saturday as part of a broader effort to boost children’s literacy rates in Pittsburgh.
Providing resources to families is key to allowing parents to provide for their children, First Lady Katie O’Connor told summit attendees at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s Homewood branch.
“Because at the end of the day, that’s all we really want as parents,” she said. “We all share that universally. We want our children to have a life that is better than ours and the way you get there is giving them learning and giving them access to books. All of you play a role in that.”
Saturday marked the second Children’s Literacy Summit. The first summit, held last September, centered around the idea of whose job is children’s literacy?
The question was meant to be provocative, library president Andrew Medlar said, and it led to many realizing that children’s literacy is everyone’s job.
Over the past year, various organizations have worked to put that philosophy into practice, and several of those groups, including the Learning Disabilities Association of Pennsylvania and United Black Book Clubs of Pittsburgh, presented their efforts at the summit.
Those efforts included taking students on a library crawl, expanding tutoring programs, distributing books at doctor’s appointments and hosting read aloud events.
What all of those methods have in common is that they require funding, State Sen. Lindsey Williams said. Investing in areas — like school libraries, reading specialists and special education — would make a huge difference in students’ education, she said, but schools need money to do that.
“The huge problem of how we currently fund our schools is that we are constantly being forced to rob Peter to pay Paul,” she said. “We’re moving money around to cover requirements while … very important, critical programs that are not mandated are going without.”
The state needs to invest in schools in a way that allows them to cover the items that help students learn, not just the state and federal mandates, Williams said.
This year’s summit built on the question posed the year before, expanding it to whose job is children’s literacy now?
The answer, Medlar said, is still everyone and the call to action remains the same: Get a library card. Have books in your home. Be a reading role model. And read together every day.
Those steps may sound simple or obvious, he said, but they can have a lifetime of impact.
Roughly 44% of third graders attending Pittsburgh Public Schools were proficient in reading during the 2024-25 school year, according to the most recent data published by the state.
Medlar said moving the needle on children’s literacy is a long game.
“Coming out of this summit, what I see already is a renewed sense of inspiration and enthusiasm and dedication to continuing this work,” he said. “I think because it is a big issue — children’s literacy is a big issue and a big challenge — it can sometimes feel overwhelming, so in knowing that we’re not alone in doing it, that it is all of our jobs, I have seen inspiration and rejuvenation to this big job.”