Canadian Authors Donate Books to Los Angeles School Libraries

Children's author Helaine Becker launched an international book drive - after recently seeing an empty library shelf at Chavez Elementary School in Long Beach, CA.

"It made me so mad, especially since I grew up in the U.S., and I went to public school, as did my parents and grandparents," she says the Canadian author by email. "Today's kids deserve the same opportunities we had."

That's why she's using Twitter, Facebook, and her blog to get the word out about Air lift to LA, a grassroots effort to provide California media centers with badly needed books.

During author visits in the Los Angeles area, Becker found herself so "appalled" by the state of some school libraries that fellow writer Sandra Tsing Loh, who shared her concerns, teamed Becker up with the nonprofit Access Books, which provides titles to underfunded school libraries across Southern California.

From there, Becker used the momentum to launch an ad hoc book drive, collecting 650 titles for Barton Elementary School in Long Beach, which arrived just before school let out this summer.

Now her Air Lift to LA has collected more than 700 new and gently used books to date, which Becker and Access Books plan to send to a public school in the Compton Unified School District (CUSD) in Compton, CA, for the start of the 2010-2011 school year.

"Canadian authors have banded together to EMBARRASS THE HECK out of the U.S. authorities who have allowed public school libraries in poor neighborhoods to wither and die," Becker wrote on her blog earlier this month. "A functioning library in a school provides learning opportunities like none other. If kids in poor schools don't have a good school library, and the chance to read and learn at school, where exactly will they learn?"

Why Compton? CUSD's book to student ratio in the library averages 8 to 1, according to Access Books, while California's Department of Education has implied that K-12 model school libraries should have 28 books per student, according to the February 2010 draft of its School Library Standards.

"When I started, I had no expectation that it would take off like this," says Becker, who has dipped into her own pocket to pay for book shipments. "I thought maybe I would get a couple of hundred books, call UPS and send them off for $100 to $200. But now it's going to be more like $600 or $700, and there are more books coming."

Authors and publishers from Julie Johnston to Scholastic Canada have really taken Becker's cause to heart, sending volumes for students of all ages, including early chapter books, picture books, and young adult novels.

"The fact that I've been able to motivate people and get them to send me books tells me there's a hunger to get books in schools," says Becker, whose own recent title, Magic Up Your Sleeve (Maple Tree Books, 2010), came out this spring. "We're not librarians, but we're interested parties, writers, and almost all parents."

As many media specialists know, school libraries have suffered huge budget cuts across the country. Some school districts have eliminated school librarian positions and others have closed media centers, with many more librarians watching their funds shrink. And Becker hopes her book drive might bring more attention to the difficulties facing school libraries today.

"I know that if there's awareness on both sides of the borders, we can understand what school libraries are facing," says Becker. "I'm hoping other people will do this and if they have the same 'Aha!' that I had, something may change."

(article originally appeared in the July 28, 2010 issue of School Library Journal)