A phrase keeps surfacing on this team: you cannot fill a leaky bucket. A school can teach beautifully for seven hours and lose the ground bu morning if a child goes home to a household without the tools to keep the learning alive. Cheri Dean of the United Way of the Coastal Empire leads the effort, which is less about running programs than about clearing whatever stands between a family and its child's reading — knowledge, confidence, a ride, someone to ask...

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The team is starting up a Parent Literacy Pilot, running workgroups to learn what families genuinely need, and building a shared needs-assessment tool. Hence, the county's many helpers stop working blind and start working from one page.