Senior Director Sara Sinek is here with some super exciting news about the Summer Challenge! Drumroll, please…Introducing the New 2012 World Reading Record! Take it away, Sara…

Summer might be over, but we sure ended it with a bang!  Children of all ages, from across all 50 states and 32 countries joined together to Read For the World Record this summer and the results are in: a New 2012 World Record of 95,859,491 minutes read all summer.

Not only did we break the world record, we broke it BIG TIME – by more than 20 million minutes (64,213,141 minutes read in 2011).  CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL THE  READERS!  It was all part of the sixth-annual Scholastic Summer Challenge, a free online program dedicated to getting kids reading to stop the ‘Summer Slide,’ the loss of academic skills when students are not in school.

As part of the Summer Challenge, kids also read for their school. Out of the nearly 4,500 schools that participated, twenty of them came out on top, reading the most minutes of all schools! Our Top 20 Schools listed below not only get a shout out from their friends here on OOM, but also will be featured in the 2013 Scholastic Book of World Records, which will be available through Scholastic Book Clubs, Scholastic Book Fairs, book stores nationwide and as an ebook on Storia™ later this year.

So just which awesome schools made the top 20?

The 2012 Top 20 Scholastic Summer Challenge Schools:

**Brooksville Elementary School (Brooksville, FL):  3,463,452 minutes read

Sun Valley Elementary School (Monroe, NC):  2,567,912

Paine Intermediate School  (Trussville, AL):  1,816,380

Hill Intermediate School (Houston, TX): 1,290,609

St Gregory Elementary School (Tyler, TX): 1,230,063

Savannah Country Day School  (Savannah, GA): 1,165,200

Village Elementary School  (Hilton, NY):  1,092,331

Oakridge Middle School  (Clover, SC): 1,072,746

Worsham Elementary School (Houston, TX): 1,057,259

Odom Elementary School  (Houston, TX):  1,015,633

Valley Intermediate School  (Pelham, AL):  1,009,897

Bright Horizons (Charlotte, NC):  999,643

George L Hess Education Complex (Mays Landing, NJ): 907,524

Riverview Elementary School (Saratoga Springs, UT):  884,329

IDEA Frontier Academy  (Brownsville, TX): 873,380

Liberty Park Elem School  (Greenacres, FL):  849,183

Newell Elementary School  (Allentown, NJ):  844,801

Scott Elementary School (Melrose Park, IL):  832,471

Enders – Salk Elementary School (Schaumburg, IL):  828,446

Reedy Creek Elementary School (Kissimmee, FL):  824,425

**Top honor in the 2012 Scholastic Summer Challenge goes to Brooksville Elementary School in Brooksville, FL, with 3,463,452 minutes read. The population of the town of Brooksville, is just 7,264 people, yet elementary school students have read a combined 6,639,861 minutes in the summers of 2011 and 2012! Congratulations!

Check Out These Cool Summer Challenge Facts:

Top 20 States with the MOST minutes READ:

1. Texas
2. Florida
3. North Carolina
4. Illinois
5. New York
6. Pennsylvania
7. New Jersey
8. Georgia
9. Alabama
10. California
11. Massachusetts
12. Colorado
13. Ohio
14. Michigan
15. Virginia
16. South Carolina
17. Wisconsin
18. Minnesota
19. Missouri
20. Utah

STATES WITH THE MOST MINUTES READ

Did your state make the top 20?

Biggest State!

Texas lead the nation in minutes read this summer with 16,054,221. That’s 12,652,321 more minutes than the state entered last year!  Five of the top 20 schools are from Texas, with three of them from the The Aldine School District in Houston.

International Participation:

Three international schools read enough minutes to rank in the top 100 worldwide: Seoul Foreign School, Seoul, South Korea (#27); Our Lady of Mercy, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (#41); Newry High School, Newry, Northern Ireland UK (#77). Schools from 32 countries added minutes to the new world record.

To further the message about the importance of summer reading in the U.S., 48 Governors’ Spouses and 3 Governors joined the Scholastic Summer Challenge as Reading Ambassadors. On behalf of their participation, Scholastic donated 500 books to each Reading Ambassadors’ school of choice (for a total of 25,500 books) so that students in their state could take home books and read over summer vacation.  In addition, the Scholastic Summer Challenge’s nonprofit supporter, Reach Out and Read®, helped to spread the message about the importance of summer reading to parents and children across the country.

For the third year in a row, WordGirl^™ served as the national “Ambassador of Summer Reading,” in conjunction with the annual Scholastic Summer Challenge. She adopted summer reading as her cause, encouraging kids to read books over the summer because reading introduces new words, and new words, in turn, make better readers.