Original article posted on Arkansas Online, January 19, 2025
Kassadi Seidenschnur’s 2 1/2- year-old Tim checks the mailbox with her almost daily, always excited about the possibility of finding a new book inside.
Seidenschnur signed up Tim and his 9-month-old brother, Jack, for Arkansas Imagination Library, which works with the national Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library to provide one book per month for children between birth and 5 years.
“He always wants to see if there’s a Dolly book in the mailbox, and it really makes his day when there is,” she says. “He wants to open it and read it when we do receive it.”
Seidenschnur, an elementary school librarian as well as a mother, appreciates that the books are carefully chosen by a committee, appropriate for each of the six age groups eligible for the program.
“It honestly took my breath away, the care that went into selecting books to send to kids to help foster a love of reading,” she says. “These are not the little cheapy books — they’re nice. They’re well-known authors or great illustrators or they’re award-winning or they’re maybe a classic that has been thrown in here and there.”
The first sent to each child signed up is The Little Engine That Could. The last book each child in the program receives, upon turning 5, is a customized version of Look Out Kindergarten, Here I Come.
Linda Eilers, vice chairman of the Arkansas board of the Arkansas Imagination Library and retired University of Arkansas, Fayetteville professor of reading, got involved with the nonprofit about six years ago.
She taught elementary school in Little Rock for 15 years before getting a Ph.D. in reading education. She taught in Louisiana and Mississippi before being hired at the University of Arkansas. Eilers retired from the university in 2022 and moved back to Little Rock.
Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library was launched in 1995, then benefiting children of her home county in Tennessee. In 2002, county affiliates in Arkansas started delivering books to children, and by 2016 were distributing 16,700 books each month. The Arkansas Imagination Library was created in 2017, through a one-time gift from then-Gov. Asa Hutchinson.
Eilers says the organization’s goal is to enroll at least 65% of the state’s eligible children in the Imagination Library. As of now, about 46% are signed up. Getting the word out about the eligibility of children is one challenge. Funding is another.
“My role is to help get the word out and help local program partners raise money to meet their expense for funding the books,” Eilers says. “The books are free to kids, but of course nothing is really free. The books are expensive, and it’s expensive to mail them.”
Dolly Parton and the Dollywood Foundation cover many of the organization’s overhead expenses and administrative needs. Arkansas Imagination Library covers half the costs of buying and mailing the books, and the local organizations, approximately one per county, that partner with the state Imagination Library are expected to secure funds to cover the other half.
“Some of the program partners — those are generally by county — just can’t raise the money to do that,” she says, meaning some counties have to turn down families who want to sign up their children because of a lack of funding. “In some areas, like Pulaski County, they have done a lot of work and if a kid enrolls they are immediately funded, but some of our poor counties — and interestingly it’s Northwest Arkansas, really — are underfunded.”
“All of the research and all of the experts say that it’s critical that children are exposed to books and reading and all kinds of literacy before they enter school,” she says. “It’s critical, and so getting these books in the hands of kids as soon as they’re born and having the books to read to them — because the books that are mailed from Dolly Parton are age-appropriate, they change as the children get older — it’s just critical that they’re able to become familiar with stories and that they understand print carries messages and to get them excited about it.”
Research is just beginning, through the Arkansas Department of Education, to evaluate the effects of Imagination Library enrollment on children once they start school.
Seidenschnur’s students would have aged out of the Imagination Library program, and she is not sure if any of them participated.
“I see all kinds of kids who come in with different experiences with books. You’ve got kids who come in with no books. A few years ago, I had a little girl who asked me how to turn the pages of a book,” she says. “And then you have kids who will interrupt my story 1,000 times to say, ‘Oh, I know that book. We have that book at my house. Or my daddy doesn’t do that sound effect like that.’ As a librarian and as a parent, I want to bring the magic of reading back, and I think Imagination Library is a piece in doing that for kids all around Arkansas.”