Five years after the initial onslaught of COVID-19, students are beginning to return to pre-pandemic reading levels, according to the results of a Spring 2024 Iowa Statewide Assessment of Student Progress.
Despite these results, concerns over literacy rates persist as the assessment reveals significant gaps for students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, students learning English, and students with disabilities. The Iowa City Public Library’s At Home Services is one program in Johnson County working to eliminate barriers to literacy and encourage students to read at home.
The service allows library card holders to request material from the library and have it shipped directly to their residence free of charge. The program has been a part of a portfolio of services the library provides to make accessing the library’s resources easier since 1974, and includes services to the Johnson County jail, the Book Bike, and the Bookmobile.
“What we were trying to accomplish with outreach services is enhancing access to folks who may not organically or easily be able to come to the downtown institution,” Sam Helmick, the community and access service coordinator at ICPL, said. “Whether that’s a barrier to travel, economical, familial, or sometimes physical.”
People interested in utilizing the service simply need to fill out a form they can request be mailed or emailed to them, or they can call the library directly to have the form filled out. The form allows people utilizing At Home Services to select specific material they would like to check out, or to help librarians build a profile on the type of material a user is interested in being recommended.
The material is then mailed to the borrower’s address in a sturdy bag with a return stamp, eliminating any sort of costs that might be associated with delivery services and providing access to essential resources to those who otherwise would remain unconnected.
“When you’re providing access to information, what you’re really doing is providing access to opportunity,” Helmick said. “This is something the community can use to make sure everybody is welcomed, everybody is in a community, everybody feels like they belong, and everybody is given an opportunity for access.”
While At Home Services are available to anyone unable to physically visit the library, Helmick said they see the services being especially helpful for those going through transitional phases in their life and those with health concerns that limit their ability to access the downtown library. In the 2025 fiscal year, the library was able to serve 210 users, delivering 3,329 items through At Home Services.
Audrey Brock, manager for At Home Services, said the service is also available to people in rural Johnson County who are not associated with an affiliated town. Brock said she sees isolation being one of the biggest issues people utilizing At Home Services face.
“One thing I’ve noticed talking to a lot of my patrons is they’re not as upset about their physical issues as they are about the fact that they’re isolated,” Brock says. “So having the opportunity to, in some way, participate in the community is something that they tell me means a lot to them.”
The services could also help with literacy rates in Iowa by exposing children to a diverse range of texts that they can read with their parents at home and removing barriers to accessing print text, Leah Zimmermann, the assistant director of the Iowa Reading Research Center, said.
She referenced research that showed that the more books that children have at home can predict their literacy skills down the line, as shown in a two-decade long study published in Social Science Research, which found evidence that immersing children in an environment with books benefits their future education.
“A program like the Iowa City Public Library’s At Home Services opens up that access so that students and parents can read a variety of books, get new books as often as they might like, in order to provide those rich and varied experiences with text that are really important to literacy development,” she said.
For Brock, it’s not just children’s literacy that should be a topic of discussion, but adult literacy as well, following a 2019 study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics estimated one in five adults possess low literacy skills.
“Anybody who doesn’t have the opportunity to continue expanding their mind, whether that’s through reading or any other kind of brain exercise, I think that can affect anybody’s well-being,” Brock said.
For Helmick, another benefit of At Home Services is it brings the services the library provides that are essential for improving the quality of life and well-being of all library users. The library, Helmick said, is not only essential to democracy but is an important infrastructure for maintaining quality of life in the U.S.
“Wherever you are in your journey as a person living in Johnson County, the library is there to support you in that journey civically, socially, emotionally, and entertainment-wise,” Helmick said. “If the library doesn’t come to you, then we’re not leveling out the playing field for everybody to enjoy their library the same.”