My name is Andrew Smith and I am the Assistant Principal at Garrison Elementary.  We are a Title I, DC Public School in the U Street/Logan Circle neighborhood of Washington, DC, serving roughly 250 students in pre-school to fifth grade.

We are raising money in hopes of adding 115 new books to our classroom libraries in grades kindergarten through second.  Many of our readers are reading below grade-level and are in desperate need of lower-level books that are high-interest to them. Without these books, students who are already behind become disengaged and bored with reading, continuing to fall further behind.  Our hope is to reverse this trend in the earliest possible stages!

At the simplest form, we realize that the more students enjoy reading, and  the more that students read, the more likely they are to be prepared for a great future.  Research shows (Frey and Fisher, 2013) students that read 20 minutes a day are likely to be exposed to 1.8 million words a year, and are likely to score in the 90th percentile of standardized testing.  On the other hand, students that are not independently reading are likely to be exposed to only 8,000 words a year and score in the bottom 10% of standardized tests.  As a school community, we firmly believe it is our duty to help students fall in love with reading.

With the texts we have priced out, each class set will cost roughly $700, with individual books costing around $6.06 each.  It only takes one book for a student to fall in love with reading, and with your donation, we can greatly increase the chance of every student falling in love with reading - and thus, be a more successful reader, student and citizen!