Yes its true.  In 24 hours ‘Bring Reading Rainbow Back for Every Child, Everywhere.’ kickstarter crossed the $1 million mark.  As of this writing its past $ 2.5 million and still climbing!  This is a great success for LeVar and his team in LA, but there is something larger here.  The understanding that reading is one of the core tools for betterment, entertainment, understanding.  So there is hope for us after all. 🙂

From 1983 to 2006, Reading Rainbow won 26 Emmys. In 2012, Burton brought the show back as an app for tablets, but what he really wants to do is bring reading to every child everywhere.  Not every child has a tablet,  so he turned to the Internet community through kickstarter to raise $1 million dollars to produce classroom content and give it away free!  And not only will he raise the $1M, its looks like it will be $4 or $5M  by the time the 33 days are done.  Check out their reaction when they crossed the mark.

From the kickstarter…

Our goal is to cultivate a love of reading in all children, not just those that have tablets. To reach kids everywhere, we need to be everywhere: we need to be on the web.

(also), a resounding number of teachers have told me that they want Reading Rainbow in their classrooms, where they know it can make a difference. We will provide it, along with the tools that teachers need, including teacher guides, leveling, and dashboards. And in disadvantaged classrooms, we’ll provide it for free.

Every Home. Reading Rainbow’s digital collection already contains hundreds of books and video field trips… but with your help, we’ll be able to make the Reading Rainbow library available on more of the devices modern kids use to consume content. When we meet our initial goal of $1,000,000, we will launch a new version of Reading Rainbow on the single most-used digital platform: the web.

Every Classroom. Together, we want to provide Reading Rainbow to as many classrooms as possible FOR FREE! When we meet our initial goal of $1,000,000, we can put Reading Rainbow in over 1500 classrooms at no cost to the schools!

And that’s just the beginning. The first million raised will help us get onto the web and into 1,500+ classrooms… but now that we’re there (!), we’ve got some big ideas for stretch goals.

We’ll be sharing our new goals in the next 1-2 days, but we promise: every dollar you contribute will help us bring Reading Rainbow to more platforms, and provide for free in more classrooms.

We can make sure that millions of kids learn to love reading, but we can’t do it without you. That’s why I hope you’ll join me in making a difference!

 

Good Job LeVar!