Literacy is vital to Lexington’s future. City leaders can’t ignore it now.

In 1992, Lexington Mayor Scotty Baesler and the Urban County Council created the Carnegie Center to serve as our city’s primary force for literacy. In a unanimous vote, the Council bestowed city funding on Carnegie and launched it on a mission to make Lexington one of the most literate cities in America.

Now, the 2020 Council must decide whether to end the city’s 28-year commitment to literacy.

Lexington’s mayor has proposed a budget that would, for the first time since Carnegie’s creation, remove all literacy funding from the center. Over the past 28 years, the city’s support for Carnegie has grown and shrunk as the economy wavered.

But never before has a Lexington Council cut off the Carnegie Center. Never has a Council determined that literacy should be left to the philanthropists— that it’s not worth one-fiftieth of 1 percent of the city budget to ensure that hundreds of Lexington schoolchildren from low-wealth families have free tutoring and educational support.

The $78,000 that Carnegie received from the city last year, after a rigorous grant process, went directly to helping children in poverty struggling to read. Without the money, three Carnegie jobs could be eliminated —the staff members who recruit volunteer tutors and arrange thousands of tutoring sessions — adding to the pandemic’s economic and personal toll.

And Lexington children would be the biggest losers. Children lose because the Carnegie tutoring program is proven effective: the average child in the program gains 1.5 years of reading skill in one year of tutoring. Statistically, children who don’t read effectively have a worse outcome in almost every aspect of adult life; future city councils will have to deal with the fallout.

The mayor was facing enormous pressure to balance the budget while not raising taxes, and the proposal does a commendable job highlighting the potential losses. The Council now has a critical decision to make: With $21 million sitting unused in the city’s Rainy-Day Fund, is this the time to hold back $78,000 that would help local children learn to read.

When school starts this summer or fall (in whatever form), we’ll be facing an educational crisis. While most Lexington children were Zooming into their classes with laptops and Wifi, a significant minority didn’t have a working computer or reliable internet. Despite heroic efforts by the Fayette schools, not every student who left school in March could be engaged this spring in online learning.

I keep thinking about my own tutoring student, a first-grader I’ll call Manny. As executive director of the Carnegie Center, I participate in our programs so I can see first-hand how they’re working.

When I first met 6-year-old Manny last winter, he wasn’t reading, his teacher told me. On our seventh meeting, with a little encouragement from his tutor each week, Manny read out loud for the first time.

That was also the last time I saw Manny. A few days later, the pandemic closed Lexington’s schools and closed off our communication.

Now, I’m just hoping that he’s reading at home. And that our city Council doesn’t give up on him.

Neil Chethik is the executive director of the Carnegie Center for Literacy & Learning and the author of FatherLoss: How Sons Deal With the Deaths of Their Dads (Hachette).