Garfield Community School Library Refurbishment
February 2025
The Garfield Community School Library Refurbishment, which took place on Feb 8th, marked our 20th library refurbishment since our organization came into existence in 2016! At Garfield, 95% of the student population is socioeconomically disadvantaged, 97% are Hispanic/Latino
and 70% are English Language Learners. Due to low funding, their school library collection was woefully outdated. A meager 5% of the titles were from 2018 or newer.
Sara Shackel, the school principal, who enthusiastically participated in the painting of the murals and was delightfully paint-splattered by the time our Marketing and Communications team caught up to her, explains the importance of the school library for recreational reading:
“Many of our families (...) here are very hard workers but they don’t necessarily have space (...) (They) have multiple families in a household and so they don’t really have a lot of books at home and so the school library is a really important place for them to get the books that they are loving and learning about the world from. So most of their access to books comes either from here at school or the community library, but it can be hard to get to the community library”
Our team bought 876 brand-new, engaging, diverse and culturally relevant Spanish and English books for the school library and donated 500 gently used and new books to the classrooms. Due to limited stock at the time of the refurbishment, 434 more books will be delivered to the school by April. The carefully curated collection includes a plethora of new, diverse voices, powerful autobiographies, gorgeously illustrated works and of course much-loved popular book series such as Elephant and Piggie.
From 9am to 3pm on February 8th, all the brand-new books had been processed, shelved and invitingly displayed by our team members and the 57 fantastic volunteers who spent the better part of their Saturday giving back to their community by uplifting the underserved children within it.
Our brilliant new Art Director, Olivia Herlihy, and other fabulous volunteers spent over 10 hours painting the beautiful murals that now adorn the inside and the outside of the library. These murals feature popular book characters, including Dog Man and Grumpy Monkey, and are sure to be a hit with the children. The high quality paint for these murals was graciously provided by Dunn-Edwards Paints.
We are so grateful to the donors, volunteers, and the school administration and staff who came together to make Project Day the very special experience that it always is. We hope our passion for social justice will keep uniting us all as we stock and refurbish more underfunded school libraries in the Bay Area and keep providing children the access to books they need to become lifelong readers.
