With the turn of a page, Canada's largest book retailer and its school charity has quadrupled the annual library budget of Harwin elementary school.
The Prince George inner-city school will receive a grant of $60,000 over the next three years to buy new books, E-readers and reading games in a bid to boost literacy. The Indigo Love of Reading Foundation has selected Harwin among 20 high-needs schools across Canada targeted to receive a $1.5 million fund.
The funding couldn't come a better time for Marie Therrien, a Harwin teacher and chair of the school's literacy committee, who until the grant announcement was working with a $5,000 yearly budget for new library material.
"Hopefully it will enhance a love of literacy in our children, it will pay for a whole variety of things" said Therrien. "One of the things we wanted to do was support our school families by providing our parents with an opportunity to borrow materials from the school so that they can either read to their children or support their children in their homework. A lot of our parents don't have the means to do that on their own."
A considerable number of Harwin's 237 students are considered at-risk either due to socioeconomic reasons or because of learning disabilities, physical handicaps or behavioural issues. Most of the books Harwin will purchase will come from Indigo, which is offering discounted rates to schools.
The new books will be made available to individual classrooms and the school's parent room, where parents, teachers and students will be reading together on a regular basis. The school hopes to encourage buddy reading, where students are read to by their peers or by older students. The fund will allow Harwin to buy novel sets for students involved in reading circles.
"The school has provided the funds to reorganize the parent room and built some walls with windows to allow us to have some privacy and hopefully the parents will be comfortable in a drop-in situation where they can come in and see the resources and read to a toddler," said Therrien.
"We know that the more children are read to, especially in their younger years, it improves their literacy abilities in their adult lives. We do plan on having a little bit of adult literacy [training] as well."
The student population of Harwin is 61 per cent First Nations descent and Harwin plans to buy books written with an aboriginal theme. The new books will support the school's ROAR (Rally On As Readers) reading program, which uses aboriginal subject matter to build comprehension, fluency and vocabulary.
"We want to promote the love of reading for not only our kids but also our families in our community," said Harwin principal Nevio Rossi. "This [Indigo donation] gives us more opportunities to read and more of a variety. We feel quite fortunate to have been selected. It's going to provide our kids an excellent opportunity."
Since 2004, Indigo's Love of Reading program has handed out $13.5 million to 150 Canadian schools. In B.C. Moody elementary school in Port Moody and W.E. Kinvig elementary in Surrey were also selected this year by the foundation. A year ago, the foundation announced it had provided a million books for high-needs students. A literacy team comprised of school staff at Harwin and School District 57 staff made the application to the Indigo program.
