California poured $70 million into children’s literacy programs in 2022. Four years later, a Sacramento-area nonprofit has spent more than $1 million of that money without delivering a single book to a single child, and the April 7 hearing that surfaced this fact ran three hours before anyone left satisfied.
The nonprofit in question is the Strong Reader Partnership, an organization the California State Library created from scratch to function as the in-state partner for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library program. The setup made sense on paper. The original allocation gave the Strong Reader Partnership $19 million. By 2024, with most of those dollars still sitting unspent, lawmakers lost patience. They redirected the bulk of the funding straight to the Dollywood Foundation, the Tennessee-based organization that runs Parton’s national book-gifting program.
The redirect worked.
The Dollywood Foundation told legislators this year that the program has now reached more than 160,000 California children and put nearly 3 million books into homes across the state. That’s a real number. The foundation is managing distribution and program administration, though it isn’t contributing its own funds to the effort.
Which brings the accounting back to the Strong Reader Partnership’s $1 million-plus burn rate. No books distributed. No children enrolled. State Librarian Greg Lucas defended the organization’s record after the hearing. He told CalMatters in a statement that “every taxpayer dollar spent on this program is fully accounted for.” He also argued that lawmakers cut the Partnership’s funding before it could get the operation running, essentially blaming the legislature for the outcome.
Not everyone accepted that framing.
Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez, a Pasadena Democrat, and Sen. Shannon Grove, a Bakersfield Republican, pressed hard during the April 7 session, and neither one looked convinced by Lucas’s defense. Both described the Strong Reader Partnership’s accounting practices as ineffective, possibly negligent, and potentially in breach of its state contract. Their argument is straightforward: even if $1 million is a relatively small slice of a $70 million program, money that was supposed to reach kids doesn’t get a pass just because the overall budget is large.
Grove’s involvement here has an awkward dimension that didn’t go unnoticed. She wrote the 2022 legislation that created the entire program. That bill required the state librarian to partner with a nonprofit “organized solely to promote and encourage reading by the children of the state,” which sounds reasonable until you realize the language specifically disqualified the Dollywood Foundation because it’s a national organization based in Tennessee, not a California-specific entity.
That’s the bind Lucas found himself in. Grove’s own law required him to find a California-focused nonprofit partner. So the State Library created the Strong Reader Partnership to meet that requirement. Then, as CalMatters reported, Grove used the April 7 hearing to ask Lucas why he hadn’t simply given the funds directly to the Dollywood Foundation, the same organization her bill had made ineligible by design.
It’s a genuinely strange situation. The senator who drafted the rules that forced a specific structure is now questioning why that structure produced problems. Lucas can reasonably point out that he built what the law required. Grove can reasonably point out that the organization built to meet her law’s requirements spent seven figures accomplishing nothing. Both positions contain truth.
What they don’t contain is a clean answer on accountability. California’s 2026 budget environment doesn’t leave much room for programs that can’t demonstrate results, and $1 million spent without a single book delivered is difficult to defend regardless of what the contract language says or what the state librarian believes happened. Pérez and Grove have signaled they want documentation, and the Strong Reader Partnership’s leadership will need to produce something more convincing than Lucas’s post-hearing statement to quiet this down.
The Dollywood Foundation’s numbers at least give the program something to point to. Nearly 3 million books in circulation and 160,000 children served since 2024 is a track record. What happens to the Strong Reader Partnership’s accountability question is still in front of the legislature.