Students love the smell, look, and feel of new books, books that stimulate and open their minds, but dwindling school funding closes the door on such rich opportunities. We are calling on "the village" to help us maintain a captivating library collection, pertinent to 21st century readers.
Located close to a state university, our school has extraordinary community involvement.
Ironically, our school funding for the library is only $500 annually; that's less than 83 cents per student. If you have bought any books after the year 1900, you know that most cost well over that. In fact, the average library-bound book is about $18. Thus, we constantly scramble for grants and donations to stay current. Our average book publication date is the year 2000. We aspire to stay ahead of this, even raising the date of our collection in areas such as social science, language, and literature, which are currently in the 1990s.
My Project
Recently we scrutinized every book in our science section. We found many to be outdated. For example, one of our books claimed polar bears are "thriving". One of the reasons we have kept these books around is we haven't had the means to update our library. We are now forced to contend with this shortcoming because all students, kindergarten through fifth grade, are checking out animal books for research projects.
We owe it to our kids to bring currency to our science collection so that their understanding reflects reality, not what was true when Ronald Reagan was president!
We seek to add these new science-focused books that are both relevant to instruction and of interest to our young readers.
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