NY Giants Rashad Jennings visits Hillsborough School

Hillsborough, NJ -- New York Football Giants Running Back Rashad Jennings visited the fifth grade students at Auten Road Intermediate School to promote the importance of reading.

That lesson was not lost on the Hillsborough students.

ARIS fifth graders read a total of 753 books as part of the Rashad Jennings Reading Challenge.

The RJF promoted reading because studies show that the link between academic failure and delinquency, violence and crime is welded to reading failure, RJF posted online.

Here are some of RJF’s facts:

• One in four children in America grow up without learning to read
• 2/3 of students who cannot read proficiently by the fourth grade will end up in jail or on welfare
• 6 out of 10 households do not purchase a single book in a year
• To determine how many prison beds will be needed in the future, some states actually base their projection on how well current elementary students are preparing on their reading tests
• 50 percent of Americans read so poorly they are unable to perform simple tasks such as reading a cereal box or prescription drug labels
• 44 million adults are now unable to read a simple story to their children.

(Photo, Hillsborough Schools Facebook)