Dear Friend of Reader To Reader,

I hope you enjoy this newsletter about the Reader To Reader Book Project. Our success is very much due to your donations of books, postage money, and most of all your generous spirit. Please forward this newsletter and help us spread the word.

Reader To Reader’s year runs October 1 through September 30, so for us this is the beginning of a new year. We are still pulling together our numbers for the past year but preliminary numbers point to over 24,000 books shipped. That’s a lot of books! Most importantly, they were the right books. By that I mean that they were the subjects that the schools needed, matched to each schools specific requirements, and all in very good or new condition. In my opinion, the books we are shipping just keep getting better as the quality and quantity of the books we receive grows ever stronger. This year we shipped more new books and a broader range of subjects than ever before.

Our growing work in Alabama brought this letter:

Dear Reader To Reader,

On behalf of Sunshine High School, I would like to thank you for your generous donation of books to our library. We are so excited about the books you donated to our school that the students followed the boxes to the library and watched me open them. Every day our principal makes an announcement reminding students to come in and check out a book to read. These have allowed our students to have a much broader selection of books than they would have had before. We are also seeing more 10th, 11th, and 12th graders coming into the library in search of a good book.

We are a small rural school with only about 400 students in grades kindergarten through twelve. Because of proration, our library is in need of good books just to meet the minimum standards set forth by our state department of education.

This is a wonderful program and it is already benefiting our students daily.

Sincerely,

Rena Baker, Librarian
Sunshine High School
Newbern, AL

Back in Massachusetts, we recently helped Springfield's William N. DeBerry Elementary School kick off their school year with a donation of 400 children's books and an absolute mountain of first and second grade level classroom materials. These wonderful classroom materials, everything from flash cards to bulletin board materials, were generously donated by retired teacher Dawn Murry, and were accumulated during her 35 years of teaching. There were so many boxes of classroom materials that when DeBerry's principal, Mary Worthy, stopped by to pick them up she found they couldn't all be fit in her car in one load. Believe me it was worth a second trip. Here is Mary's letter about the donation.

Dear David,

This is a note of appreciation for the wonderful books and elementary class resources given to William N. DeBerry Elementary School by Reader To Reader, Inc.

I chose the school gymnasium to display the many boxes of materials and books donated to our school. Even with all the boxes, it took only about 15 minutes for the staff to select materials they felt could be used in their classrooms. At the end of the 15 minutes, there was nothing remaining from the many boxes of material I received from you. Our teachers were ecstatic!

It was an absolute joy to observe teachers having so much fun quickly reviewing material and deciding on their choices. It was obvious that the quality of the material from the retired first grade teacher was superb. There was not one of her resource books remaining. It was a pleasure to see the sheer excitement on each staff member's face and to hear sincere appreciation from them as well.

I sincerely thank you and hope that we can enjoy a long-term relationship.

My regards,

Mary Worthy
Principal
William N. DeBerry Elementary School
Springfield, MA

Lastly this month, we have a wonderful pair of new volunteers in the Boston area. Rose Minior and her husband Larry Walker. Rose and Larry have joined on as a book drop-off location for Boston and suburbs. Rose has kindly offered her barn for use while books are collected and sorted and then she and Larry will drive them out to us in Amherst.

Rose is a life-long book lover who discovered our Website and exclaimed, "I love them so much and I have always wished there was something that could be done with books versus recycling them in the regular way. I stumbled upon your program by typing in "Massachusetts" and "poor libraries" - pretty cool! Kudos to you and your crew."

Kudos to Rose and Larry! If you are in the Boston area and want to donate books please call Rose in Framingham at 774-641-5257.

That's all for now.

Until next month,

Sincerely,
David Mazor
Reader To Reader
http://www.readertoreader.org
email: dmazor@readertoreader.org

Please help us with a tax-deductible donation.

Here are just a few of our recent book shipments:

Fort Fairfield, Fort Fairfield, ME

• Our Amazing World (with CD-ROM)
• A Family of Dinosaurs
• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
• Moon Loon
• The Tiny Seed
• Salem’s Tales, Bats
• The Velveteen Rabbit
• Dive to the Coral Reefs
• How Kittens Grow
• 95 more

Davidson High School, Saint Josephs, LA

• My Soul Grows Deep
• Water the Drop of Life
• Hearts in Atlantis
• Out of the Dust
• Michael Jordan Basketball's Best
• 20 more

Drew High School, Drew, MS

• Thurgood Marshall: Justice For All
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
• Chicken Soup for The Teenage Soul
• Snow Falling on Cedars
• The Moorchild
• Meridian
• 30 more

Gateway Elementary, Van Buren, ME

• Discovering Mars
• Child of Faerie
• The Story of the Titanic
• No Moon No Milk
• A Day No Pigs Would Die
• The Biggest Dinosaurs
• Don’t Know Much About the Pioneers
• Jungles and Rainforests
• 60 more

Navajo Pine High School, Navajo, NM

• 2004 Time Almanac
• Coyote Waits
• Listening Woman
• Sacred Clowns
• The Maya
• People’s History of the United States
• Weather
• 60 more

Lexington High School, Lexington, MS

• African-American Archive
• The Pioneers
• Runaway Jury
• The Burning Room
• Michael Jordan Basketball's Best
• Into Thin Air
• Space
• 25 more

Bay Ridge Elementary, Cutler, ME

• Ralph S. Mouse
• Race Across New Zealand
• The Color of my Words
• Heartland
• Jessie’s Wish
• Rabbit
• 70 more

PS 178, Brookyn, NY

• Frog and Toad are Friends
• Seven Little Rabbits
• The Pirates of Tarnooga
• Kindergarten Kids
• Earthquake Terror
• Manatee Blues
• 65 more

Homer Street School, Springfield, MA

• Good Luck Pony
• Eleanor
• Fall Leaves Fall
• The Little Troll
• Duel
• The Castle of the Cats
• Planet Earth (with CD-ROM)
• 40 more

And that's just the tip of the iceberg!

To be added to this newsletter please email dmazor@readertoreader.org