Editorial: Missouri's costly cut to young readers

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial Board, St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Jun 16, 2026

Published in Op Eds

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When it comes to preparing young children for successful lives, few factors weigh more heavily than early reading.

A Harvard Graduate School of Education study found that reading to children starting very early — even as babies — gives them measurable advantages later over those who don’t have that exposure. The American Academy of Pediatrics reports that “reading together with infants and young children … lays the groundwork for school readiness and long-term benefits throughout life.”

Providing kids with that early benefit is surely even more crucial in a state like Missouri, with its chronically underfunded and underperforming education system.

Yet, in the latest stark illustration of the skewed priorities of our state’s leaders, Missouri’s new budget guts a nationally lauded, modestly priced book-gifting program for young kids to achieve $4 million in savings — an inconsequential sum in the state’s bigger budget picture. Gov. Mike Kehoe and the Legislature can and must undo this shortsighted mistake.

Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library is a renowned program that mails one free age-appropriate book a month to children from birth to age 5. Operating in all 50 states (as well as overseas), it is funded in part by the Dollywood Foundation, along with public and private support.

Missouri has had a special relationship with the program since 2024, when it became the first state to fully fund it. Parton, the country music superstar, joined then-Gov. Mike Parson in Kansas City in August of that year in a celebration recognizing the milestone.

Parson declared it “Imagination Library of Missouri” Day and praised both Parton and the program for bringing literacy to kids. The following year, Missouri’s state-funded program handed out 1.9 million books — significantly more than the 1.6 million that its much larger neighbor Illinois handed out that year.

That was then. In state budget negotiations this year, Gov. Kehoe, scraping for savings wherever they could be found amid predictions of coming budgetary shortfalls, asked the Legislature to nix $4 million of the $6 million that had been requested for the program in Fiscal 2027.

That the cut wasn’t widely reported during the flurry of budgetary action last month isn’t surprising; $4 million out of a total budget of more than $50 billion is little more than a rounding error.

Press coverage of the budget has focused largely on bigger issues — like the$190 million it shorts the state’s education foundation formula. Missouri’s weak education system is all the more reason to help kids get a head start with this low-cost book program.

While the $4 million cut barely registers within the state budget, the impact on the ground is literally existential to the program.

There were almost 170,000 Missouri kids enrolled in the program as of the end of March. The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, which administers it, says it won’t enroll additional kids in the program after July 1. Those already enrolled will continue to receive books until the money runs out.

Then the books — the reading — will stop.

As word of the cut has gotten out, it has seen a surge of local, state and even national media coverage in recent weeks. Had that happened during last month’s budget negotiations, we’re guessing it never would have ended up on the chopping block. But again, it’s not a level of money that either policymakers, lobbyists or journalists are focused on when billions of dollars are being bandied about.

Sometimes, dollar amounts don’t begin to define the value of something.

“They can't wait to go to the mailbox and get that little book,” Parton told her Kansas City audience two years ago, “and they're going to take it in the house and they're going to make somebody read to them.”

Missouri’s constitution doesn’t allow the governor to unilaterally restore funding that wasn’t appropriated by the Legislature. But he can seek a supplemental appropriation to restore the $4 million and the Legislature can grant it. And that’s what should happen, as soon as possible.