Help Build a Middle School Library at Shawnee!
Donation protected
Hi folks... See that gloomy, empty room? With your help, we're going to turn it into a beautiful new library & media center for our middle schoolers!
The Academy @ Shawnee is a public middle and high school on the west end of Louisville. The high school has been around since 1927, but the middle school is only in its 6th year and occupies one corner of a very large school building. With less than 150 students, the middle school doesn’t have the resources to justify having its own “official” library, and yet we are in desperate need of one in order to help promote literacy and general love of reading amongst our students.
While we already technically share a library (and a great librarian) with the high school, it is at the farthest possible point away from the middle school section of our shared facilities – a solid 10-minute walk one-way – making it very inconvenient to access in the course of a 50-minute class period. In addition, because of its location, the official library is essentially impossible for students to access on their own time in the few minutes between classes, or before and after school. This makes it hard to promote independent reading!
To help enable our middle schoolers to have greater access to books, many teachers in the school have collected books for their own class libraries over the years. However, this year we decided it was time to pool our resources and attempt to build an unofficial library of our own for the students—AND WE NEED YOUR HELP!
We’ve already got the perfect sized room (seen in the picture above) set aside for the library, we’ve already had several thousand books generously donated by individuals and community partners such as Historic Locust Grove, and we’ve even got a carpenter enlisted to donate his time and expertise building the bookshelves we will need in the room.
But we still need funds for some key components of the project. Here’s what we’re asking for:
1.) We need about $750 to purchase the materials from Home Depot needed for the carpenter to build the five 4ft-by-5ft bookshelves. The carpenter has already started building the first bookshelf and has set the cost for materials per unit at about $150.
2.) We need about $750 to purchase the high-value books (e.g. graphic novels, new releases) that our students are most likely to want to read. Although we will be using a LOCAL BOOKSTORE for our book purchases, you can look at this wish list we’ve started if you want to know what kind of books we’ll be ordering: https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/221HV8LQHZ5Q7/ref=nav_wishlist_lists_1?_encoding=UTF8&type=wishlist.
3.) We need about $500 to purchase a few gently used comfortable chairs/couches, rugs, lamps, and wall decorations to help make the obviously drab room feel a little more inviting.
Independent reading is a major indicator and determinant of reading ability and by extension overall academic achievement. With that in mind, we teachers feel that it’s essential that we do everything in our power to entice, cajole, coax, nudge, and just all-around encourage kids to read. As long as it’s age-appropriate, we don’t really care what they’re reading! Any genre will do. But we also therefore recognize how important it is to make reading material available that will spark and engage student interest, particularly for more reluctant readers. In order to help us do that, we need a library of our own. We'd love your support in making that happen!
[Please note: although we set our fundraising goal at $2,000, we would be happy to exceed that! If we do, it will allow us to continue to add books to the collection from time to time. Thank you!!]
The Academy @ Shawnee is a public middle and high school on the west end of Louisville. The high school has been around since 1927, but the middle school is only in its 6th year and occupies one corner of a very large school building. With less than 150 students, the middle school doesn’t have the resources to justify having its own “official” library, and yet we are in desperate need of one in order to help promote literacy and general love of reading amongst our students.
While we already technically share a library (and a great librarian) with the high school, it is at the farthest possible point away from the middle school section of our shared facilities – a solid 10-minute walk one-way – making it very inconvenient to access in the course of a 50-minute class period. In addition, because of its location, the official library is essentially impossible for students to access on their own time in the few minutes between classes, or before and after school. This makes it hard to promote independent reading!
To help enable our middle schoolers to have greater access to books, many teachers in the school have collected books for their own class libraries over the years. However, this year we decided it was time to pool our resources and attempt to build an unofficial library of our own for the students—AND WE NEED YOUR HELP!
We’ve already got the perfect sized room (seen in the picture above) set aside for the library, we’ve already had several thousand books generously donated by individuals and community partners such as Historic Locust Grove, and we’ve even got a carpenter enlisted to donate his time and expertise building the bookshelves we will need in the room.
But we still need funds for some key components of the project. Here’s what we’re asking for:
1.) We need about $750 to purchase the materials from Home Depot needed for the carpenter to build the five 4ft-by-5ft bookshelves. The carpenter has already started building the first bookshelf and has set the cost for materials per unit at about $150.
2.) We need about $750 to purchase the high-value books (e.g. graphic novels, new releases) that our students are most likely to want to read. Although we will be using a LOCAL BOOKSTORE for our book purchases, you can look at this wish list we’ve started if you want to know what kind of books we’ll be ordering: https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/221HV8LQHZ5Q7/ref=nav_wishlist_lists_1?_encoding=UTF8&type=wishlist.
3.) We need about $500 to purchase a few gently used comfortable chairs/couches, rugs, lamps, and wall decorations to help make the obviously drab room feel a little more inviting.
Independent reading is a major indicator and determinant of reading ability and by extension overall academic achievement. With that in mind, we teachers feel that it’s essential that we do everything in our power to entice, cajole, coax, nudge, and just all-around encourage kids to read. As long as it’s age-appropriate, we don’t really care what they’re reading! Any genre will do. But we also therefore recognize how important it is to make reading material available that will spark and engage student interest, particularly for more reluctant readers. In order to help us do that, we need a library of our own. We'd love your support in making that happen!
[Please note: although we set our fundraising goal at $2,000, we would be happy to exceed that! If we do, it will allow us to continue to add books to the collection from time to time. Thank you!!]
Fundraising team (4)
Benjamin Self
Organizer
Louisville, KY
Samantha McCarthy
Beneficiary
Samantha McCarthy
Team member
Derek Konyshak
Team member
Sara Meierding
Team member
