An after school program that supports literacy while providing meals for low-income students will be coming to eastern Wake County this fall with the help of a $25,000 grant from the North Carolina GlaxoSmithKline Foundation.
Read and Feed, the program coming to eastern Wake, will outfit an RV to be used as a mobile classroom that students can visit after school. There, they will receive tutoring, eat a meal and collect books to build at-home libraries.
The GSK Foundation grant is only for creating the mobile classroom. The RV was acquired through a different grant Read and Feed received from the Wake Women’s Giving Network.
It will be the third mobile classroom the Cary-based organization operates.
“We go to communities where families are limited in their ability to provide the time, transportation or resources to help their child make gains in reading,” said Jan Frantz, founder and president of Read and Feed.
During the school year, Read and Feed operates about 20 sites. Hood said there will be six sites in eastern Wake County to begin, with several schools feeding into each one.
The new mobile classroom will begin at Hodge Road Elementary in Knightdale and Kingsborough Estates at the border of Knightdale and Raleigh.
In addition to mobile sites, which may change as the organization works with more community partners, there will be four land-based sites that do not use the mobile classroom.
Those sites will be Zebulon Elementary, Knightdale Baptist Church, Knightdale Elementary and the Zebulon Boys and Girls Club.
“The board was looking strategically at (eastern Wake County) because there just seems to be a greater need for those types of services,” said Read and Feed Executive Director Traci Hood. “When you get into more rural areas, you see families who need the types of services we can provide.”
Read and Feed specializes in creating mobile classrooms and working within Wake County public schools in low-income areas to provide tutoring and meals. They have been operating since 2006.
