SALT LAKE CITY — Local business and public education are two entities that have been hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in the Salt Lake City School District, where schools are beginning the 2020-21 school year online.
To help, two Salt Lake organizations partnered with a local bookstore in early August to distribute $12,500 worth of books to at-risk and low-income students grades one through eight attending Title I schools.
The Salt Lake Education Foundation and the Friends of the City Library have been partners for “quite a few years,” said James Yapias, director of the Salt Lake Education Foundation.
They have recently strengthened their partnership to address the growing issues presented by COVID-19.
Books for Children, their most recent initiative, was planned in part to combat the “summer slide” students experience during the months when they’re out of school, said Jeff Mower, executive director of the Friends of the City Library.
This particular summer has been anything but ordinary, however, and with students facing potentially longer layoffs before returning to classrooms, the initiative took on heightened importance.
The organizations connected with the King’s English Bookshop, the local store that helped select the titles to give out, contributed $2,500 to the effort and supplied the books for at-cost purchase for the initiative.
“We’ve seen the impact of businesses closing, and some of the students themselves, their parents work for some of these companies,” Yapias said. “I think it is always critical that we continue to partner with local businesses to strengthen that and really to help them during the pandemic.”
Mower said around three to four titles were selected for distribution for each grade level.
“We also went into the King’s English one Saturday morning and selected a bunch of graphic novels to supplement our books and early readers,” he said. “And it is always fun to look through books and select titles.”
Graphic novels are more expensive than regular books, noted Margaret Neville, the kid’s room manager at the King’s English, so the Friends of the City Library didn’t initially think they could afford them.
But Neville knows graphic novels are what many kids like to read, and that’s where the bookshop’s donation came into play.
The King’s English began asking customers if they wanted to donate to the cause — to make a difference.
The response was “great,” according to Neville.
“We knew that we would get a few people to donate, but we were really, really excited to see how many of our customers were donating to this program. And it was everything from adding 20 bucks or $25 to a regular transaction, to people actually donating pretty large amounts of money,” Neville said.
On Aug. 4-6, the Salt Lake Education Foundation distributed the books at three of its community learning centers in Liberty, Glendale and Rose Park.
The book distribution piggybacked on a food donation program the Salt Lake Education Foundation already runs. The books were sorted by grade level and put into bags which were then handed to families that drove through based on the age of their children, ensuring minimal contact.
“Part of the reason it was really easy for us to do this is because we’re used to packing twice a week and then doing the grab-and-go twice a week at some locations,” Yapias said.
In addition to the new Books for Children campaign, the Friends of the City Library also contributes thousands of dollars each year to the City Library’s Start Smart Program, donating up to 9,000 books to Salt Lake Community children, according to Quinn Smith, an assistant director over marketing and communications for the Salt Lake City Public Library.
From March to May, it also donated over 6,500 books to prisons, nursing homes and refugee centers, among other institutions.
Yet it felt like it needed to do more for the students of the area.
“We just wanted to get books to needy children and families and communities, so they could still have that resource,” Mower said. There have been plenty of studies done about how having books in the home impacts learning and outcomes well beyond schooling, so that was really important to us.”
The Friends of the City Library funds these initiatives in a variety of ways, including grant money and donations. Before the pandemic, they also hosted used book sales.
Moving forward in a pandemic, Mower said the group will have to “think creatively” to continue supporting these projects.
However, if the King’s English’s experience is any indication, the organization may not need to worry much.
“I think it proves pretty clearly that our community does want to make a difference,” Neville said of the support the project received from community members.
The Friends of the City Library and Salt Lake Education Foundation already have preliminary plans for multiple new programs, including one to provide online resources intended to give additional support during the hiatus from in-person education and another to provide school supplies.