Six School Libraries Get $10,000 Richer
By Jennifer Pinkowski -- School Library Journal, 6/19/2008 12:51:00 PM
Six school libraries around the nation are seeing their budgets swell by $10,000, thanks to this year’s Letters About Literature contest.
Sponsored by the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book and Target Stores, Letters About Literature challenges students in grades 4–12 to write a personal letter to an author explaining how the author's book had an impact on the student. The six national winners received a $10,000 grant to be donated to a school library of their choice, as well as a $500 Target gift certificate.
Librarians at the schools are elated. “I suppose it is sort of like winning a librarian's lottery,” says Jennifer Shesman, media specialist at Monocacy Middle School in Frederick, MD, the former school of Maggie Tighe, who won the contest for her letter to Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World.
“It was not surprising that Maggie had won a national writing contest—she was always a fantastic student. But I never dreamed that our media center would just be handed $10,000 to spend as we wish. That's several thousand more than my usual yearly budget.”
The grant doubles the annual book budget at Cal Young Middle School in Eugene, OR, where Hunter Hastings, who won for his letter to Lawrence Taylor, author of Taylor, is a student. “We have never had a budget for online resources, so that’s a priority,” says teacher-librarian Sam Arnold-Boyd. “I’m looking at Gale's UXL reference books and e-books, and an online subscription, possibly from ABC-CLIO.”
Arnold-Boyd will also take Hunter’s literary tastes into consideration. “I’ll be ordering lots of fiction and nonfiction books related to sports. Hunter also loves Rick Riordan's [Percy Jackson] series, so I’ll focus on more adventure books.”
The grant comes at an auspicious time for Glacier View Junior High, in Puyallup, WA, where MacKenzie Dent, who wrote to Alice Mead, author of Soldier Mom, will be one of the school’s new students in September. “We are a brand new junior high, so the money will be used to complete our library stacks,” says planning principal Mark Vetter. “McKenzie and other students will be involved in the selection of materials this fall. The grant allows us to move from good to great in terms of our resources,” he says.
To see a complete list of winners and find guidelines for entering the Letters About Literature contest, visit the Center of the Book at the Library of Congress.
