Image courtesy of Ian Terry/The Herald
The new school year is coming up, and when classes resume teachers will be forced to spend the first few weeks reviewing information the students had already learned the year before. This is due to what is known as the “summer slide” or the drop in test scores that occurs between June and September thanks to lack of reading and mental activity during summer break. School librarian turned bus driver Jenny Granger is hoping to fix that.
Granger grew tired or watching students regress while cut-off from educational materials over the summer, so she decided to convert an older school bus into a mobile library. During the summer, she works to bring a library to children in Washington who may not have access to one during the summer.
“These kids are coming from very needy households and they don’t have a lot of books at home,” Granger said.
Image courtesy of Ian Terry/The Herald
Granger worked to coordinate her stops every Tuesday to coincide with the time and places of subsidized summer lunch programs so that she can better target children in need. Usually, the children are already waiting for her before she arrives.
The book was given to her from the school district in Snohomish, and she was gifted $5,000 to retrofit the bus with supplies to turn the inside into a makeshift library. The books are shelved in wooden boxes so that children can easily sort through the books, and she gave the bus a friendly, cartoonish look by placing hot pink eyelashes over the headlights.
