All-school goal: 110,ooo minutes
Read-A-Thon is an opportunity for family and friends to support students individual and collective reading goals, while fundraising for the STEM PTA! We’ll work together to reach an all-school minutes read goal, last year we accomplished 100,000 minutes, so this year our goal is 110k, we can do it! See here to learn more about the many ways our PTA budget supports STEM. Happy reading Owls!!
Registration:
The PledgeStar.com platform makes it easy for families to help their Readers fundraise and capture reading time at home through their individual account. PledgeStar allows parents to manage minutes, pledges, and donations for multiple students through a single account!
For Elementary Readers, select their teacher when registering. For Middle School Readers, select their grade as their ‘teacher’ to get started.
After registering, you’ll need to do one extra step before your Reader can begin collecting pledges and donations, add yourself or some friends and family as potential donors! You’ll see the easy to follow instructions right at the top of our Dashboard!
–Please reach out to your teacher(s) if you prefer a paper reading log to fill-out instead of using the website.
What counts as a reading session?
All reading counts towards our goal! Whether it’s reading independently, listening to a story, or reading as a whole class, every minute counts toward our goal.
Families can help Readers of every level gain reading minutes by enjoying bedtime stories, reading aloud, or even just spending time looking through their favorite illustrated story books. However your reader is engaging with reading right now counts as a Reading Session!
Individual Reader page:
Like teachers, each family will have their own Dashboard. Through their Dashboard, Readers and Parents can easily:
- See their donation and reading minute progress
- Log reading sessions at home starting on April 1st!
- Customize their page with a picture and personal message
- Adjust the language used on their page
- Request pledges and donations, or make donations themselves!
- Access their personal donation page and share it with family and friends!
- Set their own personal fundraising goal!
This year, we’re able to allow families to collect pledges to help friends and family motivate your Readers through the Read-A-Thon! But don’t worry, flat donations are still available too!
While each reader will have their own personal donation page, there is an option for general donations. This link is available for flat donations, as pledges need to be tied to a specific student. General donation link HERE.
Prize store and more!
This year, the PTA is will be hosting their own Reading Minute Prize Store! After the Read-A-Thon finishes, PTA volunteers will organize a space and time for participating Readers to come and ‘spend’ their reading minutes on fun prizes! We’re also hoping to provide some top reader prizes again! More details to come as we approach the end of R-A-T.
Additionally, if our amazing Readers hit our 110k minutes goal, we have a special treat planned for all students to celebrate!
Corporate Matching
You can double the value of your donation by asking your employer to match your contribution to our R-A-T! Ask your company’s Human Resources department for a matching gift form. Please reach out to treasurer@stemk8pta.org with questions.
Join Read-A-Thon efforts!
Business & corporate sponsors: The PledgeStar platform has support in place to invite local businesses and corporations to become sponsors of our fundraiser.
Please reach out to Chau Schiffer at chau@stemk8pta.org who is heading up our Sponsor and Prize collection team! We’re super grateful for any help our community can provide in terms of Sponsors or donated prizes!
All business sponsors will have their logo and name shared on the various websites throughout our Read-A-Thon after signing up, but the higher donation options have additional avenues for sharing their name and info with the community via handouts and/or bookmarks that will be given to families at the end of the fundraiser.
Prize store donations: We hope to receive some donations from our community and local businesses that we can award to our top readers at the end of the event as well. We’ll share more details for these prizes, if we’re able to secure them, toward the end of the fundraiser. If you have prizes to donate or can join these efforts, please reach out to Rojine Rudio at rojine@stemk8pta.org.
Please reach out to executiveboard@stemk8pta.org with any questions on our 2026 Read-A-Thon!
