Othello girl takes grand prize in reading challenge
Brooklyn Gilbert, 10, of Othello won a Nintendo Switch as the grand prize in this year’s Mid-Columbia Libraries Summer Reading Challenge. As far as anyone can tell, she’s the first grand prize winner ever from Othello.
COURTESY PHOTO/JENNY NOYOLA
OTHELLO — An Othello girl walked away with the grand prize in Mid-Columbia Libraries’ Summer Reading Challenge.
Brooklyn Gilbert, 10, won a Nintendo Switch.
“(The Summer Reading Challenge) starts in mid-June and ends in mid-August,” said Othello Library Customer Service Specialist Jenny Noyola. “The kids have to read for 15 hours, then they get entered in the drawing for the big prize.”
The grand prize wasn’t the only thing summer readers could win, Noyola said. Local businesses contributed smaller prizes as well.
“Time Out gives us coupons for pizzas for all the kids who finish,” Noyola said. “Pik-a-Pop gives us things, and Ace Hardware gives us money. McDonald’s gives us a free soft drink for them.”
The Summer Reading Challenge extends across all 12 branches of the Mid-Columbia Libraries system in Benton, Franklin and parts of Adams counties, said Associate Communications Director Carlos Orozco, and is open to both children and adults. About 4,000 readers signed up for the program system-wide, Orozco said, of whom about 3,000 reached the 15-hour mark.
As far as either Noyola or Orozco knew, Brooklyn is the first Othello reader to win the grand prize. Noyola said she checked with a co-worker who had been at the library for 15 years, and she couldn’t remember seeing a winner from Othello either.
“(Brooklyn’s) whole family comes in quite often,” Noyola said. “She’s a pretty avid reader.”
In a town the size of Othello, the public library is an important place for both children and adults, Noyola said, because it offers so much for little or no cost.
“It's a place that you can loiter; we don't kick you out for being here,” she said. “We offer a bunch of board games the kids can play … We offer the Lego club once a month, and I hold contests twice a year to try to get kids in here, because it's (a small community) and there's not a lot of things to do around here, so we try to make sure there is stuff to do. One of the local people here started a little knitting circle that they have every Monday, and we're trying to let the community know that we have a room that they can use if they want to.”