Our school is having a book drive. A notice will be sent home asking for gently used or new books to be donated to the school library. Inside the cover the child who donated the book's name will be stamped. "This book was donated by ____"
Did you get the info on the One For Books program Scholastic is running? It came with our book fair kit and my rep called and told me about it. You collect funds through canisters at businesses or within your school and use that money to help with your fair in anyway you want(like buying books for underpriveleged kids) then Scholastic matches the amount in books that they are donating to Kids in Distressed Situations, National Literacy Foundation, and Toys for Tots. They expanded the program after Hurricane Katrina where they are giving more books to KIDS and they are distributing them to schools in the areas hit by the hurricane.
We decided to just collect money within the school and give the cash to the Red Cross.
We had a new coordinator last year and she reduced the amount of junk much to the delight of most parents. She kept the posters in their cartons, and only had 1 parent ask for them. I think her plan is to eventually weed out everything except the pencils and erasers (like you said...school supplies) because we do have many underprivileged children who can't afford the $4 for a book.
I would like to see the money we collect for the votes put into a fund that will help these children purchase a book at the fair. I am going to propose this at our next meeting.
Excellent idea. Our book fair starts the middle of this week and goes into next week. We are giving every student a book.
In reference to the "junk": Last spring I only put out stuff that was school related like pencils, erasers, bookmarks during the daytime hours, then during the evening hours I put everything out. That way it was up to the parents if they wanted to purchase the items. We also ran a promotion where the kids got to draw for a prize when they purchased a book. That really helped to motivate them to shop for a book instead of trinkets.
