A community outreach project conducted by a group of students resulted in the donation of 446 books for K-12 students at Academics Plus Charter Schools in Maumelle.
The Literary Citizenship and Professional Issues class with Sandy Longhorn had the task of creating a community project as a way of encouraging students to contribute and interact with other literary communities using their talents and interests. Students Allie Abide, Cat Bumpers, Drew Weld, Erin James, Hannah Crawford and Piper Mullaney teamed up on this project and settled on the idea of a book drive.
“The goal of the community project assignment was for students to identify real-world problems in the literary community and to address them with an ethical solution,” Longhorn said.
The group set out boxes across campus during the last week in March through April second in the Student Center, Short-Denney Hall, Win Thompson Hall and Torreyson Library. The goal was to collect new and gently used books in order to donate them to a group that was in need of books for all ages.
“One big issue in education is having adequate resources for students. Some schools do not have the proper funding for such resources. Some teachers have to pay out of pocket for these students. With resources making a difference in a crucial point of life and the addressing of an important literary citizenship issue, we decided to host a book drive,” Abide said.
The group hoped to collect at least 100 books; however, they ended up passing their goal by more than four times what they had anticipated. The donation resulted in over 400 books in a variety of reading levels from kindergarten to 12th grade.
“We chose to donate to the underserved students at Academics Plus Charter in Maumelle since it is such a small school, and they usually do not receive much help in the way of things like age-appropriate books,” James said.
Academic Plus Charter Schools consist of three Maumelle schools: Maumelle Charter Elementary, a K-5 school, Maumelle Charter High School, grades 6-12, and Scott Charter School, grades K-9. The three schools had a total of 1,550 students in 2019.
The Literary Citizenship and Professional Issues course focuses on how students pursuing a literary career can connect and engage with campus, local, regional, and national literary communities. The course is an upper-level Responsible Living core requirement for Creative Writing majors and minors.
“We spent the first month of the semester learning about the literary community and discussing many of the problematic issues that exist within it. Then, students were able to self-select into small groups based on their interest in any number of these issues. These groups then created activities that worked toward solutions, such as the book drive being an action that acknowledges Arkansas’s low literacy rates and takes a small step toward helping raise those rates by putting books in the hands of early readers,” Longhorn said.
The students plan to take all of the donations to Maumelle on Monday, April 11, to give them to Academic Plus Charter Schools. The success of the project has the students considering putting on another book drive in the fall semester.