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.

Before I tell you about this month's new developments, it is always great to hear positive reports about the positive impact these books have on a school. Here is a note from SV Marshall High School in Lexington, Mississippi.

Hi David,

I wish to thank you for your most recent shipment of books. This year I have 3 periods of Advanced Placement students taking college courses on the Internet. This is a first for our school. It must be all the books!

Thanks again,

Thea Rogers, Librarian
SV Marshall High School
Lexington, Mississippi

And here's a note from Navajo Pine High School in Navajo, New Mexico.

Hi,

We are all back to school. It seems that summer went very quickly. I had a lot of books waiting for me thanks to Reader To Reader. I was excited to see lots of Tony Hillerman. Anything about the Southwest is always read by our students. Thanks for the encyclopedia. It was like new. I have to get busy and put up all our new books.

Thanks once again,

Carla Clauschee
Navajo Pine High School
Navajo New Mexico

Elsewhere, Reader To Reader is red hot in Alabama. In August we decided to expand our work in Alabama and contacted Sunshine High School in Newbern, which has 347 students of which 97% live below the poverty line. We shipped them out an initial shipment of 400 books and only a week later we received a call from Amelia L. Johnson High School in Thomaston, Alabama. Seems that they had heard about the program from Sunshine High and their 382 students, of which 94% live below the poverty line, were also in desperate need of books. 250 books went out their way and then the phone rang from Greensboro West High School in Greensboro, Alabama. To make a long story short, each school has been passing our program on to the next, bringing a major expansion of our work in the state. Here is a note from Wendy Tucker, librarian at the Akron Community School West in Akron, Alabama, about joining the Reader To Reader program.

Dear Reader To Reader,

Thank you so much for adding us to your school list. Akron Community School West is a poor, poor rural school with only one store (gas station) in the community (not town). 98% of our students receive free lunches and 99% are minority. Most of our students only have the opportunity to look at a book at school. They are so excited knowing that they can actually take the books home when they check them out for the first time.

I can't wait to get the first shipment and believe me these kids deserve it.

Thanks,
Wendy Tucker, Librarian
Akron Community School West
Akron, Alabama

In other news, this month I'm pleased to report that we have been awarded a $2,000 grant from the Xeric Foundation to support our work in Western Massachusetts.

The Xeric Foundation is a private, nonprofit corporation established by Peter A. Laird, co-creator of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. We are very grateful to Mr. Laird and the Xeric Foundation for helping fund the Western Massachusetts Book Project, which currently serves 15 Western Massachusetts schools, most located in inner-city Springfield and Holyoke.

And last but not least, three cheers for the Westfield Middle School for their Reader To Reader Book Drive. These super kids gathered over 3,000 children’s books which will benefit needy schools in the Pioneer Valley and across the country.

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:

Akron Community School West, Akron, AL

• A Child's Book of Stones & Minerals
• Baby Whale
• Ancient Egypt
• Comets, Meteors & Asteroids
• Animals in the Wild
• The Grapes of Math
• The Runaway Bunny
• 115 more

Hughes High School, Hughes, AR

• Michael Jordan Basketball's Best
• Operation Turtle
• The Cay
• 101 Ways To Do Better In School
• Night John
• Nature's World of Wonders
• 40 more

Simmons High School, Hollandale, MS

• My Soul Has Grown Deep
• Thurgood Marshall: Justice For All
• Into Thin Air
• Hot Words For The SAT
• Gulliver's Travels
• Let The Circle Be Unbroken
• The Right Stuff
• 20 more

Holly Grove High School, Holly Grove, AR

• America's Smithsonian
• Gal
• Phenomenal Woman
• First Field Guide to Amphibians
• Weather Facts
• Moby Dick
• Puzzling Brain Games
• 25 more

Leland High School, Leland, MS

• Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker
• Another Country
• People's History of the United States
• Don't know Much About History
• Selected Poetry of W.H. Auden
• 15 more

Tallulah High School, Tallulah, LA

• Touching The Void
• No Name in the Street
• Year's Best Science Fiction
• Prehistoric Animals
• American Birds
• Monkeys & Apes
• The Runaway Jury
• Secrets of the Great Pyramids
• 25 more

Navajo Pine High School, Navajo, NM

• Daughters of the Earth
• Coyote Waits
• A Wrinkle in Time
• The Inca
• Skinwalker
• Winter Moon
• Snow Crash
• Maternity Ward
• 100 more

Bay Ridge Elementary, Cutler, ME

• Birds
• The Magic of Color
• How Animals Tell Time
• One Morning In Maine
• Picture Poems
• Sunny
• Stuart Little
• The Velveteen Rabbit
• 60 more

Greensboro Elementary, Greensboro, AL

• Wild Babies
• White Fang
• Wilderness Challenge
• World's Weirdest Bats
• How Things Are Made
• Heidi
• Harry Potter & the Sorcerer's Stone
• Origami
• Trouble for Thomas
• 95 more

Okolona High School, Okolona, MS

• The Harris Family
• A to Z of African-American History
• Jane Eyre
• Dinosaurs
• Madame Bovary
• Rocks, Mineral & Fossils
• 30 more

And that's just the tip of the iceberg!

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