San Francisco Public Library’s longstanding Summer Reading program has always sought to aide San Francisco youth in succeeding in their educational endeavors, such as by preventing learning loss over the summer months when school is out of session. The Library has also had a longstanding goal to increase participation among Teens. In 2013, thanks to the collaborative relationship between San Francisco Supervisor Mark Farrell, a San Francisco native who participated in the Library Summer Reading program as a child, and City Librarian Luis Herrera, the Library was able to leverage the Supervisor’s keen interest in the Summer Reading program as a pathway to success and support a generous educational scholarship for eligible middle or high school age participants. Each member of the Board of Supervisors receives $100,000 in discretionary funds. Thanks to the longstanding Summer Read program, Supervisor Farrell identified San Francisco Public Library as a top priority for his discretionary spending, offering one-fifth of his total sum to the Library to fund the four, $5,000 scholarships. Teens were eligible to try for the scholarships by completing the required 30 hours of reading and submitting five or more book reviews. The addition of scholarship opportunities for Teen Summer Read participants led to a 45 percent year-over-year increase in the number of teens who signed up for the educational enrichment program in summer 2013.

To make the program successful, San Francisco Public Library’s youth services team developed a system that would ensure fairness in chances to win one of the four, $5,000 educational scholarships citywide, while also ensuring that teens were actively engaged with Summer Reading. In addition to requiring participants to manually enter the time they read in SFPL’s online summer reading platform, we wanted to help teens make the most out of their summer reading experiences with a clear connection to reading comprehension and analysis. As a result, an additional step was added to the Summer Reading program as an entrance requirement for the scholarships – a requirement to submit five, 150-word book reviews. Each review was vetted by San Francisco children or teen librarians and published on the Summer Reading website. Reviews were accepted in all languages. Although the San Francisco Supervisor promoting the program represents just one of 11 districts in San Francisco, he immediately agreed that the scholarships should be offered to any student participating in the program, citywide. To promote equity of program, San Francisco Public Library used its existing four library districts, randomly selecting a winner from each district who had met the requirements. The funded scholarships were placed in 529 savings accounts to ensure the funds would be used for secondary education expenses.

The 2013 Summer Read scholarships were tremendously successful in engaging teen participants in Summer Reading. Enrollment among teens in the Summer Reading program increased from 1,172 participants in 2012, to 1,702 teen participants in 2013, an increase of 45 percent and they read for a combined total of 49,777 hours over the summer. Plus, the teen participants submitted more than 1,200 book reviews on the web-based Summer Reading platform, nearly triple the number submitted by adults or children. The program brought citywide recognition and media coverage to the Library’s efforts to support educational pathways to success for San Francisco middle and high school students. Supervisor Mark Farrell committed to continuing to fund the scholarships, and San Francisco Public Library has been in discussion with another San Francisco supervisor to expand the number of scholarships available in 2014.