This is a guest post by Ruth Johnson, Media Specialist at Clearview Elementary.

With sincere gratitude, I am happy to report on the significance of the $565 grant that our Clearview Elementary Media Center received from your organization.  Your grant was used to support an important need in our school’s library.

Clearview hosts our district’s Spanish immersion program for students in K-5.  In addition, our school has traditional classrooms where neighborhood children attend for instruction in English. 

As a result, our school library has to essentially be “two libraries in one”.  With tighter funding through the years, it has been a challenge to keep both collections updated and growing in current reading material.  

In many ways, most of our collection growth came about by hosting Scholastic Book Fairs and using the proceeds to purchase books.  While we are very thankful for this opportunity, the book selections are limited, especially in getting Spanish literature that is genuine and not just a translation of English titles.

So, when awarded your grant, we focused on buying books that would help grow our Spanish collection.  Our school is comprised of 17 classrooms and 12 of these are Spanish immersion, so our need was to add many more book choices and copies to the Spanish side of our library.

Working with a book company that has special pricing for districts with higher poverty levels, we were able to order 140 books with the grant award covering almost all of the cost!  I think this is a huge return on your money, as it averages to be less than $4 per book!  Who would ever expect to get that many books for $565?  

Now what will those books do?  They will delight our students who each check out from 1-2 Spanish books per week!  Having new literature to choose from is such a treat!

I sincerely thank you for this opportunity to expand our book collection at Clearview!  Please know that your organization and its mission are much appreciated!