She's
Trying to Make a Difference,
Book by Book
By
SANDY BANKS
She
remembers the moment of her epiphany.
She
was a college student surveying local campuses for her dissertation
on school libraries. As she walked the halls of a Brentwood elementary,
her eye was drawn to a collection of student-made posters, marking
the semester's 100th day.
Almost
every one was decorated with food . . . hundreds of Cheerios and
kidney beans and pieces of macaroni, glued to posters to tally the
days.
"And
I thought about the school in Watts that I'd just come from, and
how the children there would never dream of using food to make an
art project," recalled Rebecca Constantino.
"And
I realized that the gap between these two communities was as wide
as the Grand Canyon." With serendipity, her chance to help
narrow that gap came later that day, when she learned that the Brentwood
school had hundreds of books to dispose of, to make way for new
ones in its library. She loaded the discards in the back of her
car and ferried them down to the Watts school she'd left, to stock
its beleaguered library. And Project Access Books was born.
There
are 1,040 students--all of them so poor, they qualify for free lunches--at
South Gate's Independence Elementary.
The
2-year-old campus is pleasant enough, with air-conditioning, bright
lights, new playground equipment . . . and less than one library
book for every student.
The
children are not allowed to take books home--there are not enough
to go around. So reading for pleasure is confined to one 40-minute
library visit every two weeks.
Is
it any wonder, Constantino says, that our children are having trouble
learning to read?
"The
best predictor of reading achievement is the number of books
you have available to you," she says. Yet California ranks
last in the nation in its financial support for school libraries.
The
average school library nationwide is stocked with 18 books per student.
In California, our libraries average 13. In Los Angeles, the average
is only five . . . and even that fails to reflect the inequities
between suburban schools and those in the inner city.
Research
shows that children in poor neighborhoods have fewer books available
in their homes, schools and public libraries combined than affluent
children have in just their homes.
"The
whole debate over [whether to teach reading using] phonics or whole
language should be overshadowed by the fact that too many kids have
nothing to read," Constantino says.
That
will change at Independence next week, when Constantino delivers
3,000 books donated by Santa Monica's Canyon Elementary. And a book
drive underway at Carver Elementary in San Marino will produce another
2,000 volumes for Queen Anne Place Elementary in the Miracle Mile
area of Los Angeles, where the entire library collection was destroyed
last year by rain.
In
the three years since Constantino made her first impromptu
delivery, Access Books has funneled more than 12,000 books
to inner-city school libraries.
"Kids
on the Westside, they want a book, they go to Amazon.com,"
she says. "But I meet children in Watts every day who have
never owned a book in their lives, whose eyes light up at the prospect
of having just one book of their own."
A
self-described
"odd child," Constantino grew up in Reno, the youngest
of six children raised by a single mother who taught math at the
local university.
"I
never
wore anything that wasn't a hand-me-down," she recalls. "We
bought all our clothes at garage sales and thrift stores. But we
always had books, and they were my escape. And what I read has influenced
every adventure I've ever tried to take."
Those
adventures have included three years in Paris, one in Israel, a
stint working for the U.S. Senate in Washington, D.C., and a year
teaching literacy in the black South African township of Soweto.
In
between, she earned a master's in teaching English as a second language
and a doctorate in language, literacy and learning. She currently
conducts teacher training workshops for local school districts and
runs Access Books from her home, soliciting donations from friends
and school officials she meets.
"It's
a total volunteer operation," she says. "No one
gets paid a penny, and whatever it costs comes out of my pocket."
She
does it because she remembers the joy that books brought her . .
. and because she remembers the little boy at the first school she
visited, who cried when he was told he could keep only one from
a pile of donated books.
"It
was heartbreaking to watch," she said. "He kept saying,
'I can't decide, I can't decide.' I finally whispered, 'Just take
all three.' And I'll never forget the look on his face."
Reading,
she believes, "should be an inalienable right."
"If
you take away poverty as a predictor, the state of the school library
is the best indicator of literacy, reading achievement, success
in school.
"I
can't possibly take away poverty. . . . But I can do something about
the libraries in our children's schools."
And
so can we.
Copyright
2000 Los Angeles Times
This
article was posted with the permission of the author, Sandy Banks,
of the Los Angeles Times. It first appeared in the Tuesday,
January 18 ,2000 edition, in the "Southern California Living"
section. We would like to thank Ms. Banks for helping get the word
out and her generosity in allowing us to post this article.