LIBRARY REFURBISHMENTS: LAIRON SCHOOL
FEBRUARY 2023

Lairon College Preparatory Academy, in the Franklin McKinley School District, serves children in grades 4-8 in Southeast San Jose. The school’s Library Media Assistant, Del, applied for a library revitalization grant because she felt passionate about providing her students with an improved selection of pleasure reading books and was unable to secure funding within the school or the district to refresh the aged collection. She worked tirelessly to buy books from book fair fundraisers and even with her own money to add current books that would interest her students. She told us that quite often students requested graphic novels or books on subjects she didn’t have and felt so disheartened that she couldn’t provide those books. When Del applied to Access Books Bay Area for a library refurbishment grant we were excited to work with Del and her principal at the time, Julie, since both were such strong advocates for improving their school library and there was a great need to revamp the book collection.

The student population at Lairon is vastly considered to be socioeconomically disadvantaged by federal guidelines and based on the high cost of living in the Bay Area all of the students are living in very low-income households. Since 93% of Lairon students participate in the free and reduced lunch program, the majority of the Lairon families don’t have the means to buy non-essentials like books for their children, thus relying on the school library to be their main source of pleasure reading literature for their children. The students at Lairon are 85% Latino/Hispanic, 11% Asian and 3% African American. Unfortunately the existing collection of books did not reflect this diverse population of students, since they were purchased decades ago when the student demographics were different, so we focused on purchasing books that reflected the current diverse student body.

Ahead of the project day, Del weeded out over 3500 books from the library collection that were old, irrelevant, or just too damaged to stay in the collection. This library was already well-furnished with cozy seating and rugs, as Del is very resourceful and bought second hand furniture with DonorsChoose funding, so we were able to focus solely on purchasing new books and one new book display carousel.

On February 4, 2023, the staff and board of Access Books Bay Area, the staff of Lairon and 50 additional volunteers came together for an all-day work project to refurbish the Lairon school library. Volunteers added spine labels and barcodes to the brand new books we purchased for the library and painted colorful murals inside and outside the library to make it more bright and exciting for the young readers. In all, we donated over 1200 brand new books to the library, donated 1000 gently used books to the classrooms, painted murals inside and outside the library, and provided lunch to the 66+ volunteers.