Feb 14, 2023
Students around Horry County Schools recently participated in the READBowl competition, sponsored by former NFL Super Bowl champion Malcolm Mitchell’s Share the Magic Foundation. This annual Super Bowl-themed event has students track the number of minutes they and the other members of their team of classmates spent reading during the 28 days leading up to the Super Bowl. Winning teams are announced on Super Bowl Sunday.
The READBowl is divided into four “conferences” made up of teams from different grade levels. The Primary Conference includes Pre-K through second-grade students, while the Big 3 Conference is exclusively for third graders. The Elementary Conference is for students in fourth- and fifth-grade students, and the Middle Conference is for sixth through eighth graders.
This year’s READBowl had over 4,000 teams made up of over 110,000 students around the world who read a combined total of over 87 million minutes. In HCS alone, students read over 20 million minutes. That equates to almost 39 years of reading! That’s an average of about 395 hours of reading by each of the 856 HCS teams, or about 14 hours per day over the 28 days of READBowl. The average HCS student read 17.7 hours, or 37.8 minutes each day.
This was the first year that HCS participated in READBowl districtwide. Teams from all 28 elementary and 13 middle schools worked hard to win their conferences. HCS’s rookie teams were up against seasoned veterans. Many of the top-ranked teams have participated in READBowl every year since it began in 2017, and several of them have won their conferences in the past.
Despite the challenge, teams from across HCS consistently ranked in the top 25 for their conference throughout the competition. Three teams were also declared “state champions” for South Carolina for having the highest number of books read among other teams in their conference around the state, even though they didn’t win at the national level. Below is a list of the state champions and schools with one or more teams finishing the competition in the top 25 of their conference.
State Champions:
- Primary Conference – Ms. Rhyne’s class, Palmetto Bays Elementary
- Big 3 Conference – Mr. Fox’s class, River Oaks Elementary
- Middle Conference – Ms. Wims’ 4th block class, Ten Oaks Middle
Primary (Pre-K through 2nd Grade) Top 25:
- Carolina Forest Elementary
- Myrtle Beach Primary
- Palmetto Bays Elementary
Big 3 (3rd Grade) Top 25:
- Palmetto Bays Elementary
- River Oaks Elementary
- Seaside Elementary
Elementary (4th and 5th Grade) Top 25:
- Green Sea Floyds Elementary
- Ocean Drive Elementary
- Palmetto Bays Elementary
Middle (6th-8th Grade) Top 25:
- Ocean Bay Middle
- Ten Oaks Middle
One team from Ocean Bay Middle deserves special recognition, though. This year is 6th grade English Language Arts teacher Victoria Mysholowsky’s first year teaching for HCS, but that didn’t stop “Miss M.” and her students from out-reading around 650 other middle school teams to become the national champions in the READBowl Middle Conference!
Ms. Myshelowsky’s team read for more than 5,300 minutes per student, topping 551,00 minutes as a team. That means each student spent around 89 hours reading in total, or approximately 3.15 hours reading daily for the 28 days of the READBowl event.
While HCS wants to congratulate Ms. Mysholowsky, Ms. Rhyne, Mr. Fox, Ms. Wims, and their students on their victories, we are proud of all our participating students' success. HCS believes that reading is both the gateway to learning and its own reward, and we are excited that so many of our students spent time reading. We hope they will all continue their reading success for many years to come.
