Founded in 2007, the Kid Scoop Foundation is a nonprofit institution dedicated to expanding student interaction with their local newspapers, creating lifelong readers, critical thinkers and participating citizens. In addition, our programs help encourage young people to engage in their communities and the world at large.

In the brief period since Alexsis and Vicki dreamed up an organization to support student interaction with their local newspapers, the entire newspaper industry went into upheaval. An upheaval which is being discussed on many levels, but one discussion has been nearly non-existent. That is the discussion of how to engage young readers in news and their communities if all media goes digital.

Getting community news into the hands of young people is critical to deepening community engagement. The 2004 NAA Foundation report, Growing Lifelong Readers, documented that newspapers delivered to students via formal, teacher-directed lessons, promotes life-long readership. The NAA report, Driving Civic Engagement shows that students who read news are more likely to vote and become civically engaged as adults.

Since 2007, newspaper education programs reduced or eliminated the print delivery of their product to classrooms in favor of delivering e-editions. Severe declines in teacher participation resulted. And the teachers that receive e-edition classroom subscriptions have not used them as often or as effectively as the print editions. There is a need to quickly get teachers using a variety of digital news media including the electronic editions of newspapers in the classroom. With the aggressive push by many newspapers to stop sending printed newspapers into classrooms and offering teachers e-editions instead, there is a risk of teachers stopping the use of community news and information in the classroom. Because so many young people do not see a newspaper at home and they are not as a group reading news in print or online, we risk the creation of a generation that is disconnected and disenfranchised.

Training is key to addressing this crisis of literacy and citizenship. Few newspapers have the staff or budget for training. There is a gaping need for turn-key training materials that newspapers can distribute and/or market to their local teachers. The Kid Scoop Foundation intends to utilize non-profit and charitable foundation funds to develop practical resources and networking opportunities to support teachers in the effective use of digital media in the classroom. This will enable teachers to quickly transition from using print to digital news as a teaching tool – insuring community news readership and an engaged public for a new generation.

The Kid Scoop Foundation

• A non-profit organization founded in 2007 that is dedicated to expanding student interaction with their local communities, creating lifelong readers, critical thinkers, and participating citizens.
• Provides unique programs and fun interactive activities to enhance student achievement through programs that actively involve students in their local communities and the world at large.
• Uses newspapers and other news resources as tools that encourage literacy and advocate a sense of social responsibility and hometown pride.
• Dedicated to help local, national, and global communities grow in education, health, and unification.
• When the community comes together to promote literacy, everybody wins: citizens are united, kids learn, communities become safer, and a better and stronger work force is created!

The Kid Scoop Story

Kid Scoop is a company that was developed to address two key issues: youth disenfranchisement and literacy. In 1985, elementary school teacher and Kid Scoop CEO, Vicki Whiting, created the newspaper feature "Kid Scoop" with the goal of interesting young people in reading their local newspapers. The page's "pencil-grabbing" activities and high-interest content draw young people to the newspaper. Activities on the page, and the fact that children have now opened the newspaper, leads them to reading other parts of the paper and learning more about their local community.

• Currently, more than 300 newspapers from the USA, Thailand, Uganda, and Canada use Kid Scoop on a weekly basis. It has a combined weekly circulation of more than 7.5 million.
• Through the network of Kid Scoop newspapers, our educational program directly reaches approximately 50,000 teachers and 1.5 million students.
• Indirectly, the materials reach millions of families by encouraging the reading of the newspaper at home.