Chants fill the air at elementary school around the state of South Carolina when Cocky’s Reading Express comes to visit. Hundreds of eyes lock in on USC Gamecocks mascot Cocky, cheering and excitement fill the room.

Cocky’s Reading Express is the iSchool’s literacy outreach initiative with the goal of eradicating illiteracy in South Carolina through a lifetime love of reading. Originally started in 2005 by then-student government president Tommy Preston, Cocky’s Reading Express finds its home in the South Carolina Center for Community Literacy, now overseen by passionate coordinator Margaret Cook Jackson.

Jackson has a background in puppetry and a master of fine arts from Carnegie Mellon University.

She originally targeted adults with puppetry and pop-up shows in hopes of recapturing childhood wonder. Jackson has now gone from recapturing childhood wonder in adults to storytelling and connecting with children via Cocky’s Reading Express.

In their own bus, Cocky’s Express, Jackson, Cocky and a band of volunteers travel to a South Carolina Title I school, conducting visiting groups of kids, kindergarten through second grade.

“So what we do is we go in super high energy and give them a really fun time,” Jackson says. “We show them the joys of reading, and we also show them how fun it can be being an adult that reads. We sing songs. We dance around together. We read stories.”

After being given some hugs, Cocky supplies the kids with a book bag containing a new book that they can take home, a sticker, a class photo with Cocky and, most importantly, a memory.

All of these artifacts that are taken home are extremely vital to the Cocky’s Reading Express formula — in exchange for the book and sticker each student promises to read 10 minutes a day to whomever will listen, bringing up the topic of literacy at home and acting as a way to get parents involved in their child’s reading, Jackson says.

A large number of South Carolina Title I schools are also in “book deserts.” A book desert has extremely limited access to age-appropriate reading material. Book deserts are prominent in South Carolina and Cocky’s Reading Express cannot get to everyone —leading to the creation of the Adopt a School program by Jackson and the South Carolina Center for Community Literacy.

“What the Adopt a School program does is it partners organizations, businesses, community groups with a school for a year of literacy service,” Jackson says. “Now, the goal here is to not just have a one-off story time. It’s really to foster a relationship between local organizations and the schools, because literacy really needs to become a community effort. We need more people involved in kids’ education, and this is just a method for us to do that.”

By being stewards of literacy, as Jackson describes it, the two organizations will expose students to career fields and occupations with which they may not ever have had first hand contact, acting as an introduction to the world beyond, Jackson says. Mixed with the memorable experience of meeting Cocky, the Adopt-A-School program has the potential to increase the desire to pursue post-secondary education in a time where enrollment is declining.

Currently there is a partnership between Dominion Energy and Cocky’s Reading Express — “Conservation with Cocky” teaching the lesson of keeping water, oceans and beaches clean.

The South Carolina Center for Community Literacy is currently looking for more organizations to be in the first round of the new Adopt-A-School initiative. With help from the community, Jackson sees a bright future for the students of South Carolina.

“Everything has a domino effect, and I want that domino to just push us towards having a literacy rich culture in South Carolina, with a lot of community involvement,” Jackson says.

Maybe, at the rate Cocky’s Reading Express is going, it may not be too long before a student’s reason for attending the University of South Carolina was Cocky visiting them on a Monday morning in second grade.

At the time of publication Cocky’s Reading Express has handed out 152,335 books to children across South Carolina.