As the city bustles with hundreds of thousands of visitors for the NCAA Men’s Final Four basketball tournament this weekend, local third graders have been also been taking part in the fun by scoring as many reading minutes as possible.
And a victor has emerged victorious.
W.Z. “Doc” Burke Elementary School, a public school on the city’s northwest side, won this year’s Read to the Final Four, a bracket-style challenge that pushes area schools to see which third-grade classrooms can read the most minutes.
Eighty-nine third graders at Burke Elementary participated in Read to the Final Four, reading more than 1,827,419 minutes.
Out of the 306 San Antonio area schools competing in this year’s tournament, the final four contenders included: the charter school Harmony School of Science, Royal Ridge Elementary from North East Independent School District, Freedom Elementary School from Southside ISD, and Burke Elementary from Northside ISD.
Students from all four schools attended a Read to the Final Four celebration Friday at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center. Burke Elementary was announced as the winner on the same day the college basketball tournament kicked off in San Antonio.
As a reward for reading the most minutes, Burke Elementary will receive $5,000 for a library makeover, with additional prizes awarded to the runner-up schools and top individual readers from each of the finalists.
Herff Middle School in the San Antonio Independent School District won the challenge back in 2021.
Yilsa De Los Santos, Burke’s librarian, said it took a village to get the students to read as much as they did.
“Our students left no stone unturned,” De Los Santos said.
De Los Santos said students were given opportunities to read in and out of the classroom, and the school held after-school and Saturday events for students and their families to participate in read-alouds or independent study times.
To accommodate a generation of students that De Los Santos called “digital babies,” students were provided with several digital options to pile up the reading minutes, including digital databases, audiobooks and ebooks.
“We provided them the tools,” De Los Santos said. “But it was their grit and determination that got them here.”
The competition kicked off in November with 20 participating school districts including private and charter schools. Since then, more than 27,000 students from 1,300 classrooms have read upwards of 27 million minutes.
Read to the Final Four debuted in 2016 and provides an opportunity for students to engage in the basketball fun at no cost while fostering a lifelong love of reading, a spokesperson from San Antonio Sports said.
Linda Childs, a children’s librarian with the San Antonio Public Library, read “Chester Van Chime Who Forgot How to Rhyme” at the reading rally.
Reading doesn’t just expand the world children know, Childs said. “So many things depend on your being able to read and being able to communicate.”
The sooner kids get reading, the stronger a foundation they have and the less likely they are to get involved in risky behaviors like crime, Childs said.
