Fleming preschoolers get library cards before kindergarten

The afternoon preschool class at the Fleming School/Community Library got a rite of passage with real civic weight: their own library card numbers. The children proudly displayed the cards as they prepared to move on to kindergarten in the fall, turning a simple moment into an early connection to reading, school readiness and the life of the community.

At 506 Fremont Street in Fleming, the library is more than a room of shelves for students. It operates through an intergovernmental agreement among the Town of Fleming, the Frenchmen RE-1 School District and the Fleming Library Board, which gives the library a broader role in town life than a typical school collection. Its shelves serve all ages, and the same building that welcomed preschoolers can also welcome families looking for books, programs and a place to build regular reading habits.

That matters because the library is set up to be useful right away, not just later. The Fleming School Community Library offers a weekly Story Time and an annual Summer Reading Program, two fixtures that give young children and caregivers recurring reasons to use the space together. The school district also says the library has joined AspenCat, a catalog network that lets patrons browse holdings and borrow from other libraries across Colorado, making a local card more powerful than a first glance might suggest.

The card presentation also fit a pattern, not a one-off photo opportunity. A similar preschool library-card story ran in the same newspaper in 2023, showing that Fleming has turned the milestone into a recurring tradition for children who are about to enter school. For a small Logan County community, that kind of repetition sends a clear message: the library is part of the path to kindergarten, not an afterthought once children arrive there.

Colorado Libraries for Early Literacy says literacy-based storytimes are designed to build early literacy skills and involve caregivers, which helps explain why an early library card can matter before a child ever starts class. The gesture also aligns with other early-reading efforts in the region, including Haxtun Public Library’s promotion of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which mails one free book a month from birth to age 5. In Fleming, the preschoolers’ new cards pointed to the same larger goal: making reading, borrowing and library visits a normal part of childhood in Logan County.