On Monday, parents and children paged through books in the upper level of the Mower County Government Center.

In the lobby for Mower County Health and Human Services, Mower County children are getting another opportunity to access books, thanks to the new Reading Oasis.

Health and Human Services received funds from several community groups to add the oasis section to the lobby, and it opened with a ribbon-cutting ceremony Monday.

“We really wanted to take this room and transform it into a place that’s kid friendly, family friendly and really promotes literacy, so it’s been great,” Community Education and Communications Director Amy Baskin said after the ribbon cutting.

The county received 1,200 books, five bean bag chairs, three book shelves and a book-listening station with books on CD. The books range from picture books to a third-grade reading level.

The books are in the lobby, parent visitation rooms and Women, Infants and Children (WIC) Supplemental food program area. Mower County Supervisor of Public Health and Human Services Director Lisa Kocer said the books are a “perfect fit” for the offices and sends a message that reading is important.

“It’s to promote literacy [and] family togetherness,” she said.

Baskin said there is already a word-gap of about 30 million words from the time a child is 18 to 36 months old between economically challenged families and college-level education families. Baskin hopes the lobby will be another opportunity for children to start expanding their vocabulary.

“This is a perfect place for it because they see kids from birth through the age of 6 or 7,” Baskin said. “So they’re getting books into the hands of families to start that early reading.”

Community Health Supervisor Pam Kellogg said a big initiative Health and Human Services has focused on is spending time with your children and turning off the television.

“Public health is all about making healthy choices and one of the things that we’ve been really focusing on is putting the remote control down and turning the TV off, putting the cell phones down and actually spending time with your child, and reading is part of that,” Kellogg said. “This has been just a great environment, we have a lot of children who come through here.”

“This gives them a good, healthy activity while they’re waiting to be seen,” she added.

The county received $10,000 for the project. Rotary raised $2,500 for the program, which the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation matched and then Scholastic matched both donations. Austin Public Schools also helped the project, and several community volunteers helped assemble shelves and prepare the oasis on Saturday.

“The really was a community collaborative effort to bring this to our kids and families here,” Kocer said.

SMIF and Scholastic also donated funds for reading programs at the Harriet Bishop Elementary School in Rochester, the Northfield Community Resource Center Atrium, and the the Sunnyside Elementary School in Red Wing.

SMIF Early Childhood Director Teri Steckelberg described how the Reading Oasis program started in Owatonna with a pilot program and is growing across the southern Minnesota. SMIF plans to help erect four similar libraries in communities each year for the next three years.

Austin’s oasis is a bit different. While most thus far have been located at schools, the idea at Health and Human Services is to bring the Reading Oasis to parents.

“What I love about this is we’re bring it right to places where parents are at,” Steckelberg said.

Baskin was pleased that the Reading Oasis will be a spot for parents to help their children cultivate a love of books.

“Literacy is not just reading, it’s being nurturing with your children,” Baskin said. “It’s having your children sit on your lap, it’s snuggling up, it’s reading that book, it’s hearing that vocabulary and building that vocabulary to make them better readers.

—Jason Schoonover contributed to this report.