LINDON — In 1985, fourth-grade schoolteacher Paul Thompson was simply trying to help his students learn a little more about Utah's history when he stumbled upon a promising project.
Realizing there were no textbooks available for teaching accurate Utah history to his students, Thompson started piecing together a small supplement that would teach the kids what they needed to know about their state's heritage.
Initially he headlined the project in hopes of creating a weekly reader all about Utah. Employing a small work force, he dug up the important facts on Utah's founding, then he sent his work to a publisher.
In his first year, he received more than 5,000 subscriptions. Now, 18 years later, it has leveled off at 10,000.
Thompson retired from publishing the Utah Weekly Reader in 1997, then planted a new seed in Texas where he produced a similar reader for Texas history that racked up four times as many subscriptions as Utah's reader did in its first year.
But what began in Utah has now spread out over the entire nation in a series of readers under the name of Studies Weekly, a company working out of Lindon.
Thompson's son-in-law, Ed Rickers, one of the major shareholders for the family-based business, jumped into the blossoming project in 1997 and has since turned the humble newspaper into a nationwide success.
Following the same production style his father-in-law had established, Rickers and his associates breathed new life into the Weekly Reader program that now boasts a subscription of 700,000 — a 9,000 percent increase from Thompson's original reader, Rickers said.
From what was originally simply a Utah history reader, Rickers and his small staff have now developed a State Weekly publication for nearly 40 states.
Rickers said he employs 20 writers and researchers, most of whom have been with him since the inception of the Studies Weekly product, to produce the readers that now covers everything from state histories to science.
Kathy Hoover, a retired school teacher who lives in the southern Illinois city of Edwardsville, has been working with Rickers and the rest of the Studies Weekly team to create state readers for North Carolina and Florida.
"I do the majority of my research over the Internet," Hoover said. "But I also have some resources from my own personal library as well."
Hoover, who earned her master's degree in American History in addition to teaching for 19 years, says she is meticulous when she writes the articles for the newspapers.
"I make it as perfect as I can make it," Hoover said. "I don't want someone to go back and say, 'Oh my gosh, she missed a comma.' "
"Every state has its own story. We've just researched and written those stories in newspaper format," Rickers said. "We've tried to make it visually pleasing to the students so they don't look at it and say, 'Oh, more reading,' and throw it aside."
The staff has loaded the publications with drawings, craft projects, experiments, a weekly cartoon strip and standardized quizzes to keep teachers happy.
"The kids seem to like the back page the best, because that is where the games are," Rickers said. "They can send in a write-in assignment and if they win, we'll send them a $5 prize. Even more rewarding, the kids get to see their name in the paper."
This year, The Miami Herald wrote a story about one elementary student who won the weekly write-in contest.
Rickers and his crew have had so much success with the fourth-grade level state readers that they quickly expanded to the fifth-grade level, where students study U.S. history. USA Studies Weekly is now the company's largest publication, with a subscription of 130,000 students across the nation.
In addition to individual state and nation readers, the company is expanding into third-grade classrooms this year with in-depth publications about state counties. Every week there will be a featured community, giving kids a chance to learn hometown history.
Teachers often foot the bill themselves to have the publication in their classrooms.
"A fourth of our readers are paid out of the pockets of the teachers themselves," Rickers said. "They are standards-based classroom periodicals, and no one else goes through the standards methodically like we do."
So what is the reason teachers are willing to pony up the cash for the texts?
Mary Baxter, a fourth-grade teacher at Foothill Elementary in Provo, says she's been using Studies Weekly readers for 12 years because they go right along with the Utah history curriculum.
"It is a newspaper that covers a lot of skills that children need," Baxter said. "It's a less-expensive way for the kids to get a good history curriculum supplement."
According to Baxter, it costs about $3 a year per student to take the reader. By comparison, textbooks are $30 to $40 each.
"If they didn't enjoy it, I wouldn't use it," Baxter said. "It's just about as simple as that."
In Utah, Studies Weekly's publications reach roughly 17,000 students. Fourth-graders make up the majority of Utah's subscribers with 10,000 students, fifth-grade readers are near 4,000 subscribers and about 2,800 subscriptions go to sixth-graders for the World Studies Weekly.
Rickers said Missouri and Virginia are the two states that have the most subscriptions per capita right now, but that could change as they continue to move into other states.
"We're in over 30 percent of the classrooms in those two states," he said. "In California we have 110,000 students reading our publications, but that is a much smaller percentage of the students there."
Lately, entire school districts, such as Compton School District in Southern California, are adopting Studies Weekly's readers as curriculum.
So how has Rickers been able to establish such a successful business venture with such a small staff?
"The old parable, you eat an elephant a bite at a time," Rickers said. "Some days it's hard to see the progress you've made."
Maybe Studies Weekly just has the right touch, but leave it to Rickers to tell you it hasn't been easy.
"We've gone through an inordinate amount of sweat equity," Rickers said. "It would take a big company a ton of money to do what we've done. This is a family business and it's provided a good living, but it's not like were driving Jaguars."
E-mail: thollingshead@desnews.com