(NewsNation Now) — Instead of snacks and soda pop, a vending machine at Mosaic Preparatory Academy in East Harlem dispenses children’s books.
Students can earn tokens for being kind and use them to unlock a book from the machine for them to take home.
“When it was installed, the kids were excited,” the Academy’s principal Dr. Lisette Caesar said during an appearance on “Morning in America”.
The kids can earn tokens by picking up trash and helping each other out with homework.
Kids can also earn tokens by saying hello to school safety officers and to the lunchroom staff “because these are people that we don’t normally recognize on a daily basis,” Caesar said.
“We want them to also be kind to everyone in the community because everyone has a role to play within our school community,” Caesar said.
Before the pandemic, Caesar said the kids at her school were reading online all the time.
“We have an online reading platform, they loved it,” she said.
But as the pandemic wore on, school administrators needed to figure out a way to get kids motivated to read again.
“When you’re online all day long, and now to ask kids for homework to go home online and read again, that wasn’t working anymore,” she said.
In 2018, Caesar was undergoing cancer treatment and on medical leave. While going through Twitter one treatment, she came across some schools in the Midwest that had installed vending machines and saw that it was well-received by the community.
“I thought, okay, so when I get back to Mosaic I think we need to do that,” she said.
The vending machine is still fairly new and has only been in place for a little over a month. Caesar and school officials used students’ initial intrigue as a way to encourage reading.
“We just started to build up the excitement,” Caesar said. “I hope everyone invests in getting a vending machine for their school. It is going to make a difference worldwide.”