Lynn/Urquides Elementary School gets sizable library grant

by David Safier

Friend of El Blog and Assistant Principal at Lynn/Urquides Elementary Patt Hale emailed me Thursday, giddy with excitement, about a grant her school's library received. Today the story is in the Star:

The Lynn/Urquides Elementary School library is about to undergo an extreme makeover after receiving a grant that will outfit the decades-old space with new computers, 2,000 new books, new furniture and a coat or two of paint.

The grant comes from a partnership between Target and the nonprofit organization The Heart of America.

[snip]

The library serves nearly 900 students and their parents, Corday said. But six of the eight computers have "out of order" signs stuck to the monitors and many of the books are 11 to 20 years old.

Along with the makeover, every child will get 7 free books to read, take home, swap with other students when they finish — whatever they want. The books are theirs.

According to Patt, "We're 95% free and reduced lunch and largest elementary school in TUSD." The students' economic status makes the need for a good library and the value to students that much greater. And giving books to kids who may not have any of their own can be a real game changer with immediate and lifelong consequences.

Congrats to Patt, the school, and, most important, the children and their parents.

A NOTE ABOUT EDUCATORS, AN ODD (IN A WONDERFUL WAY) LOT: I could feel Patt's excitement about the grant in her email. It flipped me right back into my old teacher mode. I replied, "That's so great!" In my regular life, I don't say things like "That's so great!" But as a teacher, you get excited for the kids, and you say things that sound a little, well, excited.

How many times have I seen teachers become gleeful about landing a grant for a few hundred or a few thousand dollars for something in their classrooms? But you know what's missing from the grants? Any financial compensation for the teacher.

So here's what happens. The teacher (or the administration) puts in ridiculous numbers of uncompensated hours pulling together a grant proposal. If they're "lucky" enough to get the grant, they're going to spend another ridiculous number of uncompensated hours setting things up, creating new lessons, working with kids.

This odd (in a wonderful way) group of people work extra hard without added pay so they can work even harder without extra pay. And wonderful idiots that they are, they get all excited about the opportunity to do all that extra work.