Welcome to the World (Wayne County Board of Education)

Program Overview

Welcome to the World is a new initiative of the Wayne County School System which aims to provide children's books to the parents of every newborn at Wayne Memorial Hospital. In addition, we will work with local OB-GYNs to provide mentoring to mothers who may not realize the benefits of reading to children even before they are born and whose children may be at a disadvantage due to the mother's age, level of education, and/or English Language Learner status. We will also partner with local daycare providers and Head Start which act as feeders for the Pre-K program at the five elementary schools to ensure that they have adequate literacy resources.

Student and Volunteer Success Stories

Since November 2019, the Wayne County School System has given, free of charge, more than 4,000 books to school-aged children in our community through two literacy fairs. While we are thrilled that we have been able to impact these children, we seek to expand our reach to newborns and their families so that we can foster the love of reading long before children walk through the doors of our schools. Local hospital officials as well as doctors in our community have committed to partnering with Welcome to the World to aid in providing every newborn with a book and to assisting us in reaching out to mothers whose educational experiences and/or socioeconomic status may cause their children to be at-risk even before they are old enough to attend school. We seek to end the terrible cycle of generational literacy deficiency that plagues so many of our community's families.