Grab your books, because the city of Stockton is challenging you. Over the past few years, Stockton has been low in the literacy category, and because of this the City of Stockton has placed a reading challenge for everyone to read.

The Stockton Reading Challenge began two months ago, and encourages anyone to pick up a book, magazine, or newspaper and read throughout the summer. This challenge encourages residents in all City Council districts to read, and log the number of items read by July 31. Any age can apply. The library along with the City of Stockton helped put this event together. Nearly everyone is excited with this two-year-running event. 

“This is just a way of getting people to read,” said Gretchen Louden, librarian at Cesar Chavez Central Library. “It’s an excellent program.”

One of the main reasons for having this Reading Challenge is to raise the literacy rate of California. Nearly one out of four people are functioning at Level 1 literacy level, which means that those people are “not having adequate reading skills.” This is shocking for many teachers in the state. Stockton is one of the main causes California has such poor literacy rate. Stockton has one of the lowest literacy rates in the state but that has not stopped the city from promoting this Reading Challenge. 

Though this is not a school related event, it is meant to help schools and the community. The Cesar Chavez Central Library has taken a great interest in helping the city with this event. “We haven’t pushed very much on this event, after last year and seeing how well it did, we wanted to be a big influence.” 

Though this event may be posed as a friendly challenge, it is not. “It is more like a competition.” With this competition being so successful this year, the library would like to help with it in future years. 

Though this event is mainly for children to take advantage of reading, there are shares of adults who are participating with their children. “The best part of this event is that at the end of the summer, all the children that entered are playing in order to go into the biggest summer party the kids have ever seen.”

The City of Stockton now asks you, “Will you take the challenge?”