School Libraries Struggle to Rebuild With Few Donations

Cindy O’Brien, the librarian at the South Plaquemines High and Elementary Schools, in Port Sulphur, La.,

spent three weeks in a warehouse several months ago sorting through thousands of books donated by well-meaning individuals.

Hoping to replace some of the 25,000 titles that were swept away by Hurricane Katrina, Ms. O’Brien came up empty-handed. She says that the book donations, mostly old paperback novels for adults, were heartfelt — but inappropriate for her students.

Now Ms. O’Brien’s library is getting some assistance from a project spearheaded by Scholastic, a company that publishes print and online materials for schools. Scholastic is providing 1,000 titles worth nearly $40,000 to Ms. O’Brien’s library, which opens this month, and free access to its online “research portal,” where students can look up information from seven encyclopedias and other sources.

The gift is in addition to Scholastic’s pledge to donate $500,000 worth of products to rebuild school libraries. In June, the company joined with NBC’s /Weekend Today/ show to announce a book drive for Gulf Coast school libraries called “Today Turns the Page.” Through the book drive, the company is allowing people to buy critically needed books from Scholastic’s catalog at cost; the gifts to Ms. O’Brien’s library came from that effort.

But the going is slow: The book drive has so far collected nearly $97,000, which barely meets the $100,000 experts say is needed to equip just one high-school library.

The modest returns underscore the difficulties many school libraries face in rebuilding. In Louisiana alone, more than 300 schools were completely destroyed or heavily damaged. With the focus on simply getting schools open again, their libraries have taken a back seat to other needs.

What’s more, gifts like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s $12.2-million grant to help refurbish Gulf Coast libraries have focused on public libraries, not school collections. Public libraries have been given a higher priority by philanthropists because they offer Internet access and other services to help both children and adults rebuild their lives.

Still, a number of nonprofit projects are under way to help decimated school libraries. In May, the Laura Bush Foundation, which raises money from private sources, made grants totaling $500,000 to help restore libraries at 10 schools in Louisiana and Mississippi. A second round of grants is expected this month.

Even with such donations, the lost collections of many badly damaged or destroyed school libraries are irreplaceable. Those include student magazines, yearbooks, and mementos.

“We’ll have new books,” says Ms. O’Brien, of the Plaquemines Parish school. “But we’ll never get back what we lost.”