As summer begins and schools are out for those hottest months of the year, an annual issue arises. “Summer slide” starts. The term refers to the tendency for students, especially those from low-income families, to lose some of the educational gains they’ve made over the year.

One program—founded by a woman who was inspired by one little girl—is changing all that for Athens kids. Last week, Books for Keeps founder Melaney Smith announced plans to expand the organization statewide, tripling its reach, within the next three years. Smith announced the plans at a session on poverty and opportunity at the Clinton Global Initiative America meeting in Atlanta earlier this month.

In seven years, Books for Keeps has distributed 240,000 new and used books to K-12 students from low-income families. While it already serves one Atlanta school and one school in Warrenton, it will be adding eight more schools outside of Athens: three in rural settings, starting in Elberton, and five schools in Atlanta. The number of students currently served this year is 4,300 children at 11 elementary schools, mostly in Athens, and the goal is to serve 11,000 children at 25 elementary schools in Georgia.

Smith was inspired when she met a girl her niece was mentoring at Alps Road Elementary in 2009. The girl wasn’t looking forward to summer because she had no books to read. Smith had plans to help the girl get books, but then she discovered that the girl’s problem was shared by many kids, particularly those from low-income families who can’t afford books, which are considered a luxury item. She built a successful grassroots program to address the issue, and in 2011 it was incorporated as a nonprofit.

During Smith’s second year of giving books away, a friend showed her a University of Florida study in which “they looked at the last 50 years of literacy research, access to books and the interaction of family income levels with those things, and then piloted a strategy to overcome all those access issues that students from low-income families face,” says Leslie Hale, Books for Keeps’ executive director. The three-year study, which allowed children to choose 12 books for the summer, “found an impact similar to those children attending summer school,” Hale says.

A co-author of the Florida study works in the University of Georgia’s College of Education and helped Smith take the critical elements of that study and build her program off of that model. “When we talk about education, it’s easy to think about the compulsory things that we have to do,” Hale says. “We’ve become such a testing-driven educational society, but there are a lot of components to education that are fun, and if we can help kids connect to those pieces of education, it’s going to help them connect to their schooling much better. It’s going to allow them to see school as something that is fun, and it’ll create those building blocks for excelling and actually completing their school careers.”

While 20 percent of the books given away through the program are received through donations by people in the community, Books for Keeps purchases 80 percent. It isn’t because they don’t want donations, but because “we are very picky about donated books we keep for the program, because the children that we serve are picky,” Hale says. “I mean that word in the best way. These are students who have learned to identify what they want and advocate for what they’re interested in. And when it comes down to it, that’s exactly what we need to be building and ingraining in the current generation of students, is the ability to advocate for themselves… because it means they’re going to become agents in their own education.”

Books for Keeps gauges demand with an exit survey that asks kids which books they’re most excited about and what other titles they’d like to see. “We have gotten really, really good at identifying the books that students want,” Hale says. That includes graphic novels that bridge the gap between chapter and picture books, nonfiction sports books, Lego and Disney princess books. “I will probably never be able to find enough Frozen books to satisfy the current demand for Frozen,” she says, laughing.

In order to meet demand, Books for Keeps is establishing relationships with publishers. It’s currently working with Skyhorse Publishing, Barefoot Books and Usborne Publishing. In addition, the Washington, D.C. nonprofit First Books works with publishers on special printings of popular books, such as Diary of a Wimpy Kid, which groups like Books for Keeps can buy for $2 a copy. The relationship benefits publishers, too, by helping them establish reading habits in kids who can’t afford to buy their books.

In Athens, the program is in schools where 90 percent or more of students qualify for federal free or reduced-price lunch programs, and 30 percent of students move within the Clarke County School District each year. So there are no eligibility requirements to participate; each May, any child who wants to can pick 12 books to take home. “[P]art of what we’re trying to do is build a safety net that reaches all the way across the community, that serves every elementary school, every single child that’s enrolled in Athens-Clarke County,” Hale says.

As such a small organization, Books for Keeps hasn’t been able to catch up with the kids in the fall, but they are working on ways to evaluate the effectiveness of the program on the kids’ educations. Looking at two schools during just the first year of the program, they saw 4 percent of students who had been reading at the “below” level in the spring rise to a higher reading level. Seeing the needle move even a little in the first year was a big success, and the program is working with CCSD and UGA to identify resources that can help them evaluate the program to determine its effectiveness.

With all the growth in the works, there are questions Books for Keeps has to think about. “We want to serve every child in our home community here in Athens, but also, what does it look like to serve children further afield from this specific community?” Hale asks. “What are the infrastructure needs of this organization? Do we need to have a warehouse located in those other areas, or is it going to come through other partnerships like the one we’re building with Scholastic Book Fairs? Is it that we have affiliate organizations in other cities? So we’re sort of dipping our toes in the water to see what that looks like.”