Chilkat Valley News - Serving Haines and Klukwan, Alaska since 1966

Larry Persily

Haines readers are more than one-third of the way to the goal of 1 million pages of summer reading. Tracy Wirak-Cassidy, education coordinator for the Haines Borough Public Library, was filling in the sign above the library doors on Tuesday as the page count had reached 360,000. The program, Together Haines Reads a Million, started June 1. Readers can log their pages online at haineslibrary.org/read, or turn in their count at the library front desk. The idea behind the program, Wirak-Cassidy said, is to help fill in for the loss of the library's summer reading program due to COVID-19 restrictions, while encouraging everyone to read more. Every 100,000 pages, two names are drawn for gift certificates to local businesses. At the 500,000-page mark, the drawings will increase to five gift cards, and then seven cards between 700,000 and 1 million pages.