Riverside High students read to Little Panther preschoolers

Riverside High School students Anna Kane Townsend, Trestiy Laster and Addy Blankenship spent part of the day reading to Little Panther Preschoolers, a small but pointed example of how Decatur County Schools is trying to build literacy habits from the earliest grades up.

The district’s live-feed post said the Riverside High School ladies “took a special moment to read to our Little Panther Preschoolers today” and described the visit as “spreading the love of reading.” At the center of the scene were older students from Riverside and the district’s youngest learners, paired together in a way that put books, attention and encouragement in the same room.

That matters in Decatur County because Little Panther Preschool was designed as part of the district’s early-learning pipeline. The preschool opened for the 2023-24 school year and provides childcare and educational services to the children and grandchildren of Decatur County School staff at a discounted rate, with a stated aim of preparing children for PreK and beyond. The preschool sits right next to Riverside High School at 4318 Hwy 641 in Decaturville, making the connection between the two campuses more than symbolic.

The district has also tied other student activities to early literacy. In a separate post, Decatur County Schools said students at the district’s Early Learning Center received books from Decatur County Save the Children’s Gift in Kind, which the district said helps provide access to books and promote early literacy. Taken together, the two efforts show a consistent message: reading is not being treated as a single classroom skill, but as a districtwide habit that starts before kindergarten and keeps building through the grade levels.

That approach fits a small school system where students see one another across age groups and campuses. Decatur County Schools includes four SACS-accredited schools and is governed by a nine-member Board of Education. Riverside High School, listed by TSSAA with an enrollment of 457, carries the Panthers and Lady Panthers mascot, and its proximity to the preschool gives the district a ready-made setting for mentoring and reading outreach.

The visit offered a practical reminder of what the district is trying to change: not just making preschoolers comfortable with books, but using older students to model reading, patience and service before children ever reach kindergarten. In a county where the schools are physically close and the enrollment base is small enough for students to know one another by name, those early-literacy connections can be built one reading session at a time.