$40,000 to support the love of reading
Indigo foundation gives Imperial Community School grant for books
At Imperial Community School in Regina, the students love reading and are set to get a whole lot of books.
The elementary school has received a $40,000 grant from the Indigo Love of Reading Foundation.
“I was shocked — $40,000, that’s a lot of money. And I’m really happy that we can get more books in our library,” said Grade 4 student Andrew Krause-Snow.
The school was one of 20 chosen from across the country. Each year Indigo advertises for applications for grants from its foundation. Another school in the same division as Imperial had received the grant before, so Imperial thought ‘What the heck?’ and sent an application in.
“I think one of the things that put us kind of up and beyond to receive the grant was we could show that we are eliciting a love of reading within the building, ”said Angela Hutton, vice-principal and teacher-librarian at Imperial School.
When the school found out they had received the grant and told their students, book requests started flooding in.
“That was the big thing, was that (the students) know that these dollars meant books in their hands,” Hutton said.
The money for the books is huge for the school. Imperial School’s library and classroom libraries are quite outdated in some cases. The school was built in 1950 and there are still a few books from that era in the library.
Hutton said that graphic novels have became a huge hit among students but with the current budget constraints they have only been able to order a few copies. This means that students sometimes were waiting a month or more just to read a certain book.
The money will be split between buying reading books for the school library and classroom libraries and classroom resources for the teachers.
“(This grant is) huge. A lot of time teachers will go to garage sales to find books or they’re paying for books out of their own pocket in many cases,” Hutton said.
The school is planning to keep on taking book requests from the students for the rest of the school year. From there they will start sorting through those requests and then will order the books and resources over the summer in order to have the new books on shelves by the time the kids come back from summer vacation.