Sean C. Morgan
Sweet Home members of the Oregon School Employees Association are asking local residents to register with First Book to bring thousands of books to the community’s schools and children.
First Book is a social organization dedicated to ending illiteracy by providing a steady supply of brand new high-quality books to low-income families. Since its formation in 1992 by attorney Kyle Zimmer, the organization has distributed 125 million books.
In its third project in Oregon, the OSEA, in partnership with the American Federation of Teachers, is attempting to gather 2,000 registrations to bring 40,000 books to Title I low-income schools in Eugene, Springfield, Corvallis and Sweet Home and Lane County Head Start.
Locally, OSEA members, the district’s classified employees who provide support services, originally set a goal of signing up 400 to meet the five-way goal of 2,000 registrations with First Book and receive 8,000 books locally; but since then they have decided to gather 2,000 locally.
To do that, they’ll need parents, educators, family members and anyone else who has a connection to students in the district to register.
The OSEA has created forms with each school’s details pre-written, simplifying filling out the form.
The forms are available at school libraries and will be available at book fairs as well as parent-teacher conferences April 23 and April 24. Information about the program will go home with students.
The registration form requires parents and various staff members at schools that qualify as Title I or are Title I eligible, which includes all of the regular schools in the Sweet Home School District, to provide a name, phone number and email address, which serves as a user name on the First Book website.
First Book sends special offers to the email address, according to OSEA. First Book doesn’t sell the email address or other information.
“There isn’t a catch,” said Elissa Edge, an organizer with OSEA. “They just want to give books away.”
Local OSEA members met April 2 to begin organizing the effort, and Monday night, they presdented the project to the School Board, encouaring its members to lead the way and fill out the forms.
“Our budgets to our libraries are being cut,” Gourley said. “We can’t get new books for our kids.”
If successful, this effort will bring thousands of books to Sweet Home, Edge said. They will go to the schools and can then be distributed among school libraries, classrooms and students.
“It’ll be a combination of all of them, I would think,” Canfield said. She envisions a model where Sweet Home receives numerous copies of a specific title, distributes a two copies to each school library and the public library and the remainder to schools to disperse to students.
For more information, call a district school and contact the media assistants in the libraries. Phone numbers include, Foster, (541) 367-7180; Hawthorne, (541) 367-7168; Sweet Home Junior High, (541) 367-7187; Sweet Home High School, (541) 367-7145; Oak Heights, (541) 367-7165; and Holley, (541) 367-7162.