Many students of the past and present would agree that their #1 favorite thing on campus is the vending machine.
Whether it’s serving up snacks or drinks, beholding the grand machine full of popular options with the luxury of money in your pocket and the power to choose whatever suits you most in that moment is a cherished feeling. If only, so many people wonder, it was this easy and affordable for kids to get their hands on new books? Well…it could be, in fact.
And that’s why this school just opened its first Scholastic vending machine. In a bid to get kids reading more, this school is taking a new approach: present the best-selling page-turners of the world in a kid-friendly package. With racing imaginations that never turn off and a hunger for any excuse to do anything except their homework, it’s more often than not that kids just need to open up a book in order to get sucked in and start flipping through pages left and right. And pretty much no kid can resist the temptations of a vending machine.
But this vending machine gets even better: the books inside are available through the purchase of tokens – not money. And these tokens are earned through a system that rewards kids from visiting and finishing other books. Through a partnership with the local library, students can check out and return books there for free to qualify themselves for the book vending program, which prevents difficulties affording books independently from becoming an issue for these students.
Once the students have earned a token, they’ve earned a free book – from a machine stocked with $1,000 worth of books inside. The vending machine even features books from every genre to ensure that there’s something for everyone.
“One of the biggest issues we have in this district is literacy. If our children can read, they can survive,” the Buffalo School Board member Sharon Belton-Cottman said in a statement.