There’s a new Everybody Wins! program this year, at Hinesburg Community School—and Janet Gray is joining the Everybody Wins! team to make it happen!

Janet has a Masters Degree in Information Science from The University of Texas at Austin and has been both a classroom teacher and public school librarian. After a few years home with her family, Janet is excited to get back to connecting children with literature. Janet and her family recently relocated to South Burlington from Colorado, and she enjoys time exploring Vermont, spending time with family, hiking, reading, embroidery, and baking.

Hinesburg Community School applied to host an Everybody Wins! Vermont program in the last round of school applications, in 2023. We are delighted to have Hinesburg on board and to work with CY Mentoring there as we do at the Shelburne Community School.

Reading in Hinesburg will take place on Tuesday and Thursday at lunchtime and will start in early December. To reach Janet and learn more about the Hinesburg program, click here. To apply to be a mentor in Hinesburg, click here.

Everybody Wins! at Brookside School in Waterbury has a new coordinator: Jeannie Randall. We are so excited to welcome her to the team!

Jeannie is a mother, volunteers as a  girl scout leader, and has been a child care provider and a lunch lady.  She loves to share books with children, and especially reading with her child at bedtime. She has two bookshelves full of children’s books at her home and donated many to the lunchroom when she was in food service. Jeannie lives in Moretown with her husband and daughter (who is a bookworm) along with her cat Kava and three fish.  She enjoys going for walks, swimming, cross country skiing, gardening, and studying nutrition.

Thank you for a great Race to the Top!

Thanks to your generosity, we raised over $15,000 for children and reading!

Thanks to The Jack and Dorothy Byrne Foundation, $5000 of that will be DOUBLED to support programs in the Upper Connecticut River Valley!

It’s not too late! Click here to donate now and help us bring reading to more children in VT and NH schools this year!

Thank you to our hosts, the Catamount Trail Association! See you on Mansfield next year!

Eleanor Perry is the new assistant coordinator in Everybody Wins! St. Johnsbury. Eleanor has been a mentor in the St. Johnsbury Everybody Wins! for 2 years. She lives in Danville with her husband John, also a St. J mentor.

Eleanor says, “One of my earliest memories took place when I was 5 or 6 years old – long before anyone thought of Pre-K programs. I was the youngest of four children, and my mom thought Iwas too young to go to the library with my siblings. My brother was charged with taking out a library book I would enjoy. When my sibs came home I heard that my brother was insulted because the book the librarian recommended was “for babies!”

Everybody Wins! is a program that assumes, as my brother did, that every child should be given the opportunity to learn to love reading. That’s why I wanted to be part of this program.”

Welcome, welcome, Eleanor! We’re so happy to have you on the team.

Katie Wiseman has been with Everybody Wins! for 10 years—fun fact, she was the first person hired by the then-brand-new director Beth Wallace. Now she’s coming back to her roots as the coordinator of our new program at Hinesburg Community School. Everybody Wins! is the luckiest!

Katie has worked for Everybody Wins! since 2014, originally as a site coordinator at J.J. Flynn Elementary and The Sustainability Academy at Lawrence Barnes in Burlington. Since 2016, Katie has processed all mentor applications as the administrative coordinator. A woman of many skills, Katie also compiles our annual survey results and creates the survey reports for each school. Katie was first introduced to mentoring with the DREAM Program as a student at Champlain College and went on to work for the DREAM Program through AmeriCorps. She is known in Everybody Wins! for her cheerful can-do attitude. Katie lives in South Burlington with her family, where they love to read aloud and visit bookstores and libraries.

Everybody Wins! is thrilled to welcome Michelle Keefler as the new site coordinator for Edmunds Elementary School and J.J. Flynn Elementary School in Burlington.

Born and raised in Montréal, Québec, Michelle has lived in Vermont since 2012. She comes to Everybody Wins! Vermont after more than a decade of volunteering in schools from one coast to the other. Her common goal is to support all students in experiencing meaningful connections and unconditional acceptance. A former mentor and South Burlington Mentoring program coordinator, Michelle has a passion for mentoring, writing, and storytelling in all its forms. She is a current graduate student at Middlebury’s Bread Loaf School of English. Michelle lives in South Burlington with her family of four, and loves to do anything outdoors, especially if it involves friends, family, cycling, gardening or birds!

You can email Michelle about Edmunds Elementary here, and about Flynn Elementary here.

Everybody Wins! Vermont has a new program manager for the west side of the state. Introducing Kelly Bouteiller!

As the former Executive Director of Charlotte Children’s Center, literacy instructional coach at Charlotte Central School, and elementary classroom teacher, Kelly Bouteiller has had the privilege to build community and joy around literacy with both children and adults for many years. Kelly has loved reading since she was a child and has a particular passion for the power of children’s literature. She has also discovered a love of crochet, and can often be found crocheting while listening to an audiobook. Kelly lives in Charlotte with her husband, their two young boys, and cats Jack and Annie—named for the characters in the Magic Tree House Series!

Kelly will support Everybody Wins! coordinators in community schools in Chittenden, Addison, and Rutland counties. We are so happy to have her on board! You can email Kelly here.

Everybody Wins! is full of excitement! We are rebuilding after the pandemic, re-opening the last 5 schools this coming fall, and even expanding to new schools in 2024. We can’t wait to see even more children greeting their mentors joyfully each week, in 23-24 and in years to come.

And what makes it possible? YOU DO! Your commitment to children and your generosity allow us to bring more mentors and more reading days to more children in more communities each year.

On August 27th, Everybody Wins! will join the annual Race to the Top of Vermont hosted by the Catamount Trail Association and sponsored by Northeast Delta Dental. Our team members will hike, run, or bike up the Toll Road on Mount Mansfield, Vermont’s highest peak. Or they will volunteer for the Race, handing out snacks and water, helping in registration, or even playing tunes for the racers. Whether they hike, volunteer, or play, everyone will raise funds to help Everybody Wins! mentor pairs start the fall off strong.

We’d love to have you come along! It’s the most fun you can have on an August Sunday in Vermont. Promise. To find out more about Everybody Wins! and the 2023 Race to the Top, click here.

Can’t be in Vermont this August? You can still help bring the love of reading to Vermont children. Click here to support Everybody Wins! in the Race to the Top of Vermont.

No matter what, Everybody Wins! mentors read with children around Vermont. Whether children are at home or in school, whether mentors are remote or in-person, come pandemic, deep mud, or high water, mentors and children read together each week during the school year.

And every August, friends of Everybody Wins! climb Mount Mansfield in the Catamount Trail Association‘s Race to the Top of Vermont to raise funds to keep it all going, no matter what!

We raise money to recruit & screen & support mentors. We raise money to pay staff members. We raise money to buy program materials and books. And we raise money to cover all the expenses of any organization: technology, insurance, telephones.

It takes a team to keep children reading with mentors around the state, no matter what! Won’t you join us? Click here for more information.

A long-time Everybody Wins! mentor at Edmunds Elementary School in Burlington, Buff Lindau is also a poet with a new book out from Onion River Press. Buff joined the Everybody Wins! board of directors in 2017 and since then has helped families find books to read at Read-A-Thons, hawked 50/50 tickets at Lake Monsters games, and written dozens of thank you cards to help us keep children reading with their mentors.

I have been dipping into The House That Holds every day or two since I received my copy a month ago. Each page, each poem tells a new story of daily life, family connection (or disconnection),  the natural world and the built one, through the poet’s eyes. It’s a great book for solace this year when so many things seem out of joint and so many of us feel disconnected and isolated. You can find Buff’s book through Phoenix Books, another local bookstore, or Amazon.

Imagine my surprise when I opened the book one morning to discover a poem about Buff’s joy in mentoring with Everybody Wins! Vermont! With Buff’s permission, that poem “Kudos to Dr. Seuss” is reproduced below.

Theodore Geisel (whose pen name was Dr. Seuss) and his children’s books have come under deserved criticism for blatant racism in some cases and racist tropes and undercurrents in others. This poem and the joyful engagement it records stand side by side with these facts but do not outweigh them. Instead, they point out how complex human beings are, and how connected our worldviews are to the act of creating. Brilliance and bigotry can be—often are—found in the same artist, and in their art.

Culture, books, and our understanding change over time. What this poem celebrates—the power of language and the joy of learning—endures.

Kudos to Dr. Seuss

Our high fives, Kiki’s and mine, hit just right—
hand to hand, solid—the thwack of a smack
echoed her pride. She read by herself today.
that Smack! shaped her day and rejiggered mine.

While there’re Brazil’s mosquitoes
spreading horrors,
and Flint’s lead-carrying water
poisoning young children

First-grader Kiki
read for the whole hour, today,
no distraction into drawing or games.
I got it. I can do it, she said.

The brilliant Dr. Seuss—catchy rhymes,
hard words and easy, Kiki plowed on undaunted,
with focus and heart and wide-eyed interest,
her smiley seven-year-old, snaggle-tooth
beautiful face close to the page.
She was working, sounding out the words,
keeping on keeping on
till we came to the end of our mentoring hour.

Nothing, not all the hugs her friends give her,
or her sparkly sweaters, fluffy skirts or excellent boots,
interests her like the books she read today.
She glowed with excitement.

Her hard work, her spirit,
a gift in the face of Flint and Brazil.
We picked the best books for next week
and high-fived a jolly farewell.

—Buff Lindau, The House That Holds