Hundreds more children in Lake County have been signed up for free monthly books through Dolly Parton's Imagination Library in the week since the country music icon's death, according to local organizers, and the surge has been so heavy that the county's enrollment website has slowed to a crawl under the traffic.
Carrie Dotson, who helps run the Lake County affiliate, said enrollment increased by a couple hundred children in the week after Parton's passing, as reported by News 5 Cleveland. The station reported that the county's Imagination Library website experienced technical delays because of the high volume of new sign-ups. Lake County's chapter, supported by United Way of Lake County, already had about 7,500 children enrolled before the recent bump.
The Imagination Library gifts free books every month to children from birth through age five, and Lake County's share of running that program costs about $8,000 a month, per the same News 5 Cleveland report. Dotson said the books do more than fill a shelf. “The books bring children, grandparents, mothers and fathers together as family time,” she said, according to the station's reporting.
A Program Fran DeWine Took Statewide
Ohio's Imagination Library program traces back to former First Lady Fran DeWine, who took the initiative statewide more than six years before this reporting, with backing from Mike DeWine. The governor's office notes that since that August 2019 expansion, the program has mailed nearly 28 million books to more than 1 million children across all 88 Ohio counties, building the foundation now absorbing the post-Parton surge. Mike and Fran DeWine have continued advocating for the program's funding even after leaving the governor's mansion, per the News 5 Cleveland report.
The scale of that reach is why Ohio officials describe the state as a national leader. Mike DeWine has said Ohio has basically two-thirds of children under age five receiving free books by mail, a figure that lines up with data from the Dolly Parton's Imagination Library of Ohio annual report showing roughly 60% of eligible children, more than 410,000 kids each month, enrolled statewide. That makes Ohio the top-performing state program in the country for Imagination Library participation.
Enrolling Before Leaving the Hospital
Part of what keeps that number climbing is a policy shift announced by the Office of First Lady Fran DeWine: since September 2025, Ohio has let parents enroll their newborns directly through hospital birth certificate paperwork, making it the first state in the country to do so. Families who sign up that way can receive all 60 books in the program's five-year collection without ever filling out a separate form. Individual donors also support the program through grants and gifts, and Dolly Parton's Imagination Library of Ohio donors can direct their contributions to a specific county of their choosing.
Costs for the program are shared by the Dollywood Foundation along with state and local partners, and Ohio's model layers a 50/50 public-private match on top of that support, according to the United Way of Greater Toledo. Under that framework, state general revenue dollars match, dollar-for-dollar, whatever local partners such as United Way chapters and public libraries raise. That structure means a rise in local fundraising can unlock more state money for county affiliates like Lake County's. According to the Ohio Legislature's House-passed version of H.B. 315, the bill appropriates $1.5 million in FY 2025 and allows tax credits beginning in FY 2026.
License Plates and Local Giving
One visible sign of the post-Parton fundraising bump is Ohio's specialty Dolly Parton license plate, which costs $35 a year and directs $25 of that fee to the Imagination Library affiliate in the buyer's home county, covering book costs for one child for a year. Sales of that plate have surged since Parton's death, according to the News 5 Cleveland report, with Spectrum News 1 reporting a 329% spike in plate purchases following her passing in late August.
In Lake County, Dotson noted that even smaller gifts go a long way. A $25 or $50 donation can cover books for a couple of children for a year, she said. Donations can be made through Lifeline's website or sent by check to Lifeline designated for the Imagination Library, and the Lubrizol Foundation is also among the local supporters helping fund the county's chapter. Lake County partners plan to continue fundraising to put more books into children's hands as the enrollment numbers keep climbing.
Dotson described Parton as genuine, authentic, down-to-earth and deeply caring about her philanthropy, and said she is known to many children simply as the book lady. Dolly Parton visited Ohio in 2022 to celebrate the Imagination Library's growth in the state, a milestone that predated both the birth certificate enrollment option and the license plate program now fueling the current wave of local giving.
Ohio Bucks a National Trend
Ohio's steady funding stands in contrast to what has happened in other states. Missouri, Indiana and Washington reduced or eliminated state budget support for their Imagination Library programs in 2025 and 2026, forcing those states to freeze new enrollments or lean entirely on private fundraising, according to Newsweek. Hoodline previously reported on Missouri's funding freeze, which curtailed new child enrollments there even as Ohio's program kept expanding.
Research on the program's impact helps explain why Ohio has kept its funding intact. A survey from the Troy-Miami County Public Library found that 95% of participating parents report reading to their children several times a week after enrolling, a 26 percentage point increase, aligning with broader research linking early book ownership to stronger kindergarten readiness. A 2022 paper listed by the National Institutes of Health's PubMed Central notes that research has linked parent-child shared book reading with improved literacy among monolingual children regardless of socioeconomic status. Research listed by the National Institutes of Health's PubMed Central has associated shared reading at home with growth in vocabulary and other oral-language skills among young children. The Dollywood Foundation has also named Ohio one of just five U.S. states offering a full bilingual English/Spanish book collection to enrolled families, and the program automatically enrolls all Ohio children under five in foster care and kinship care while keeping their addresses confidential, through a partnership with the Ohio Department of Children and Youth established in 2024.
Globally, the Imagination Library passed 300 million free books gifted to children across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and the Republic of Ireland since its 1995 creation, according to the Dollywood Foundation. For Lake County families now waiting out a slow-loading enrollment site, that global milestone is a reminder of how far a program born from one woman's love of reading has traveled — and how much local demand it is generating in Ohio in the days since her death.
