Georgia Mayors: Reading to Kindergartners

This editorial originally ran in the September-October 2026 edition of James Magazine.

For four years now I have heard the same story from mayors in cities of every size. A mayor shows up to read a book, a room full of five-year-olds lights up, and the mayor leaves having gotten as much out of the morning as the children did, if not more. Allison Wilkerson, the mayor of Grayson, told us she did not expect it to affect her the way it has. The questions children ask, she said, convinced her these small moments shape what a child becomes and strengthen the bonds shared by the community.

Cities do not run Georgia's schools. Mayors do not hire teachers, choose curriculum, or approve reading screeners. Nobody has ever been elected mayor in Georgia on the strength of third-grade reading scores. And yet more than 170 of them have signed up to read to young students. It's worth asking why.

The Georgia Council on Literacy reports that 62 percent of Georgia third graders are not reading proficiently. Children who are not reading proficiently by the end of third grade are four times more likely to leave school without a diploma. A 2023 analysis put the cost of low literacy in Georgia at roughly $1.2 billion a year in lost tax revenue, social services, and incarceration.

Georgia's future workforce starts with a child who can read. We have been the nation's top state for business for more than a decade, and staying there takes more than tax policy and available land. Employers must believe they can hire here. Site selectors read school performance data long before reaching out to a city. And if they don't like what they see, the jobs go somewhere else.

Children who cannot read become adults who cannot read a utility bill, a job application, or a ballot.

GeorgiaForward, a GMA-managed nonprofit foundation, started the Mayor's Reading Club in 2022. Grants and corporate support fund the program. Georgia has 536 cities, and the problem looks different in each one, so there is no manual to follow. Each city builds it from what it already has: a library, a Boys and Girls Club, a summer parks program, a service club looking for a project. Some mayors read in classrooms. Some host citywide reading challenges. Others organize literacy walks.

We also commissioned a series of children's books in which a young girl named Georgia Caroline and her classmates discover how their hometown works by meeting the people who run it. Learning to read while learning what a city does strikes me as time well spent.

The more valuable thing a mayor brings is not a reading voice. It is a room. In most of our cities, educators, nonprofits, employers, and volunteers are working on the same problem and rarely sit at the same table. A mayor can call that meeting and serve as a convener, and people come.

Monroe Mayor John Howard thinks the way cities have to think, in decades. "This isn't just for today, but for Monroe to thrive 10 to 30 years from now."

This year the General Assembly passed the Georgia Early Literacy Act of 2026 unanimously, and the Governor signed it in May. It was Speaker Jon Burns' priority. The money went to literacy coaches, instructional materials, screening, and teacher preparation. The plan it advances, Vision 2030, sets out three principles: every child a reader, every educator prepared, every community supported. The first two are the state's to build. The third belongs to communities.

The Governor's Office of Education and Workforce Strategy, the Get Georgia Reading Campaign, and GMA through GeorgiaForward are creating the Georgia Reads Community Collaborative to help communities organize local partnerships. Facilitator training begins this fall. Four communities will start a three-year process in 2027, with more added each year. Local elected officials will lead each community team.

The point is not another program, but collaboration. Cities, school districts, libraries, and employers are working on this already, and many of them have never sat down together to coordinate their efforts.

No literacy coach, however good, reaches a child with no books at home and an empty summer. That part cannot be legislated from the Capitol. It happens in a park, at a branch library, or at a rec center. Schools have the classroom. Cities have what surrounds it.

Georgia's cities intend to keep showing up. Which is why you'll see mayors across Georgia sitting on the floor reading to five-year-olds.