Trimming away at illiteracy one hair cut at a time

4th January 2016   ·   0 Comments

By Della Hasselle
Contributing Writer

When it comes to reading, experts say Louisiana has a problem.

With a 20 percent illiteracy rate amongst adults, the state is faring worse than the rest of the nation (15% illiteracy rate), according the organization proliteracy.org.

And in the Greater New Orleans area, nearly 40 percent of the population aged 16 and older have a literacy rate below that of a 5th-grader, according to The Lindy Boggs National Center for Community Literacy.

The problem begins in childhood, statistics show. Nationally, one in four children grow up illiterate, often because their parents can’t read. And at least one expert theorizes that kids – especially African-American boys – don’t have healthy associations with reading.

But what if there was a way to change the association? Perhaps even while getting a haircut in a barbershop?

That’s exactly what some barbers in Louisiana are hoping to do, thanks to the increasing popularity of programs that bring children’s books into barbershops and even exchange free haircuts for a kid’s reading session.

Although the program hasn’t officially made its way to New Orleans yet, one barbershop in Baton Rouge is hopping on the bandwagon, thanks to a program called Line for Line, which works in partnership with the LSU Museum of Art to encourage younger children to read.

The program takes place the first Monday of each month at O’Neil’s Barber & Beauty Salon, located at 449 North Acadian St. In addition to free haircuts and snacks, the LSU Museum of Art holds hands-on book-making activities and even offers select titles for kids to take home, courtesy of a Free Little Library for kids, assembled and registered by the Mid-City Redevelopment Alliance.

“A lot of the kids around here need someone they can look up to,” said O’Neill Curtis, the barber who owns the salon. “They need someone to motivate them to read. They need someone to stay on them about it.”

Curtis and other barbers who work with him donate their time once a month, giving free haircuts at the shop and even sounding out the words to kids when they have trouble reading.

Thanks to the local St. Aloysius School, the children have more than 3,000 selections to choose from, according to Lucy Perera, the LSU Museum of Art Coordinator of School & Community Programs and founder of the program.

“As the barbers clipped away, stopping every once in a while to lean in and assist kids with words, the boys in the chairs were 100 percent focused on reading,” Perera said about the first literacy program at the barbershop, which took place Dec. 4. “It was a magical evening.”

The program, which is slated to continue on Monday, Jan. 4, was inspired by a barber in Iowa named Courtney Holmes, who got national media attention in August when he started giving kids free back-to-school haircuts if they agreed to read to him.

“I just want to support kids reading,” Holmes said to the Globe Gazette about the event, which also offered books for free, thanks to an organization called St. Mark Youth Enrichment.

Holmes wasn’t the first to come up with the idea of partnering child literacy with barbershops.

Alvin Irby, a former kindergarten and first-grade teacher, found that in New York, young Black boys just weren’t associating books or reading with their identities.

“Fathers are missing from a lot of Black children’s early reading experiences,” Irby told City Lab in April, as he was weeks away from getting a master’s degree in public administration from New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service. “There aren’t many Black male teachers, either.”

Irby noticed a big part of the problem was access to books, and not having the chance to practice.

According to the national Campaign for Grade Level Reading, 61 percent of low-income families in the U.S. have no children’s books to read at home. That comes to about one age-appropriate book for every 300 children.

To help change that, Irby came up with the organization Barbershop Books, which provides children’s books at neighborhood barbershops in New York that African-American families visit on a regular basis.

Irby now has at least 11 barbershops partnering with his program in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

More recently, the U.S. Department of Education began participating, too, and is working with about two dozen barbershops around the country as a part of President Barack Obama’s “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative.

“This is an opportunity to make sure all kids are reading,” John King, a deputy secretary in the Department of Education, told MSNBC about that program.

According to a 2013 report by the Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy, 32 million adults, or 14 percent of the country’s total population, can’t read at all.

The same study shows another 21 percent of adults in the U.S. read below a fifth-grade level, and 19 percent of high school graduates can’t read.

And illiteracy is linked to being economically disadvantaged, with 43 percent of illiterate adults living in poverty.

Nationally, illiteracy has huge consequences, resulting in lower incomes, fewer opportunities and even in crime.

According to BeginToRead.com, 85 percent of all juveniles who interface with the juvenile court system are functionally illiterate, and over 70 percent of inmates in America’s prisons cannot read above a fourth grade level.

“The link between academic failure and delinquency, violence, and crime is welded to reading failure,” the Department of Justice has said.

If brought to New Orleans, a similar program to Line for Line could make a significant impact, since almost 29 percent of families in the metro area live in poverty, according to The Data Center.

Perera said she would consider expanding the program to other areas of Louisiana. In the meantime, she’s looking forward to watching the one in Baton Rouge grow.

At the next program in January, O’Neil will have more barbers on hand, and new books celebrating African-American authors, she said. In the future, she even wants to have a regular book club, tutoring and a program that makes books available for adults, too.

“The thing is, any kind of success has to come from within,” Perera said. “I planted the seed, but want the seed to grow with the guys at the barbershop.”

This article originally published in the January 4, 2016 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.