By Lisa Carolin
Students in the Detroit Public Schools Community District are the beneficiaries of hundreds of books recently donated by Beach Middle School.
The Beach donations were part of a larger donation project that included middle schools in Saline, Blissfield, and Clinton. Bonnie Draper from Clinton Middle School delivered 53 boxes that contained more than 2,500 books along with a map that showed every school district involved.
She included a letter that said, “You could call us your ‘western country neighbors’. We wish all the best and hope that this next year will be an amazing year for the Detroit students as they crack open a book and find themselves experiencing a new place or stretching their imagination beyond the pages of these physical books.”
Sheryl Dewyer from Beach Middle School said the Detroit Public Schools don’t have libraries in their buildings.
“These books will be offered to the teachers to supplement and grow classroom libraries so that the students have access to a better variety of books,” said Dewyer.
Many of the books donated by Beach came from the school’s media center.
“I had to do an extensive weed of our book collections so I opted to donate books that I would be removing from our shelves,” said Dewyer. “We donated primarily fiction books that were either not highly circulated or ones that we had multiple copies of that we no longer needed.”
