6 schools given grants by best-selling author

Patterson to award $1.75M in U.S.

Dover High School librarian Janet Kanady was already a fan of best-selling author James Patterson's novels for teenagers.

Then, her principal called to tell her the library had received a $6,000 check as part of Patterson's $1.75 million project to help school libraries around the country.

"I'm really a fan now," Kanady said.

Dover High was among six Arkansas schools and 127 nationwide to be selected from 28,000 applications to share in the first $500,000 in grants Patterson announced last week.

Other Arkansas recipients were Berryville Middle School, Danville High School, Elmwood Middle School in Rogers, Stephens Elementary School in Little Rock and Woodland Junior High School in Fayetteville.

Patterson is working with Scholastic Reading Club to award the grants, which range from $1,000 to $10,000 and are announced on a rolling basis throughout the year.

He is personally providing the money. Scholastic Reading Club also will match each dollar of the grants with "bonus points" that teachers can use for books and other classroom materials.

Scholastic Reading Club has a network of 62,000 schools and 800,000 teachers. It is a division of Scholastic, a children's publishing, education and media company.

Kanady said she plans to use the money "completely and totally for books."

The library she supervises in Pope County serves about 450 students.

The $6,000 grant "is the equivalent of three years of my library budget," she said.

Any school in the United States with students from prekindergarten through 12th grade can apply for the grants.

Neither Scholastic nor Patterson's publisher, Little, Brown and Co., released the amount of specific grants.

In March, Patterson announced he would award grants totaling $1.25 million. Soon after, he raised the amount to $1.5 million, and last week he increased it to $1.75 million, citing the huge response.

"With nearly half the population currently reading at or below the basic level, the United States is truly in the middle of a crisis," Patterson said in a news release.

"I've now read over a thousand letters from school librarians, teachers, and parents about the lack of resources at our country's schools. How will children make it to high school without access to books? This is a huge problem -- and we have to take action," he added.

Judy Newman, president of Scholastic Reading Club, said the bookseller has "been deluged with an enormous number of requests for support from across the country."

"More than anything else, school libraries are desperate for books to fill their shelves," she said.

Because Patterson wanted the process to be simple, the online application asks only one question: "What would your school library do with $1,000 to $10,000?"

"Again and again, teachers, librarians, and principals wrote about budget cuts and a dearth of state funding that have left their schools without books, shelves, materials, and, in many cases, librarians," the release said.

School libraries can apply for the grants online at www.scholastic.com/pattersonpartnership.

State Desk on 07/06/2015

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