Fulton County Schools students logged 11,126,597 minutes of reading during the 2025-26 school year, surpassing the district's 10 million-minute goal by more than a million minutes.

The district-wide challenge, tracked through the Beanstack reading app, covered every FCS school, including Alpharetta High School, Milton High School, Cambridge High School, and their feeder elementary and middle schools. Students earned digital badges and prizes as they hit milestones throughout the year.

Webb Bridge Middle School in Alpharetta earned district recognition for logging the most reading minutes of any school in the system, according to Fulton Neighbor reporting in June.

At Cambridge High School in Milton, media specialist Laura Morgan stocked an arcade claw machine with prizes for students who joined the challenge. Students who logged enough minutes on Beanstack got a turn at the machine, a detail reported by FCS News and cited in The Roundabout newsletter on Saturday, July 26.

At one FCS elementary school, the principal and two assistant principals dressed as leprechauns and danced at morning drop-off after students hit a reading target. The school was not identified in district reporting.

The 11.1 million-minute total represents an 11% overshoot of the goal FCS set at the start of the school year. The district tracked participation through Beanstack, a reading platform used in schools and libraries nationwide. FCS has not released a school-by-school breakdown of minutes beyond naming Webb Bridge Middle as the top performer.

The reading milestone caps the 2025-26 academic year as Alpharetta and Milton families turn toward the start of the new one. The first day of the 2026-27 school year is Monday, August 3.