Rose basketball highlights
FRI.| 4-12-24 | ENTERTAINMENT
Issue 1
September 27th, 2019
Library grant funds new books
WED. | 4-26-23 | NEWS
All media centers within Pitt County Schools were granted $32,000 to spend on books through COVID-19 relief money.
“North Carolina schools have been getting what’s called an ESSER fund and it’s basically COVID relief money,” Rose Media Coordinator Olivia Mills said. “So Pitt County Schools took 1.2 million dollars of that money this year for all media centers to buy new materials focusing on diversity in their collection.”
There was no application process required for this grant, and its sole purpose is to increase diversity within the centers’ collections.
“My boss at the county level had to go through the process of showing why this was necessary for the process of development for our students and how it would benefit them so that they would give us that fund,” Mills said.
Mills believes that through this grant, students will be able to begin reading for pleasure with new, updated books. Before the grant, the average publishing age in the Rose media center was 1999. After the grant, it will be 2015.
Photo by Casey Foeller
“Books are rarely funded in the way that they’re supposed to in media centers, just because money is pushed towards technology,” Mills said. “But there’s a lot of research that shows that the more students read for pleasure, the better they actually do in academics.”
With the main goal of this project being to increase diversity, Mills believes that it is important to make sure all perspectives are represented.
“When we go through our collection, we look at things like our student population, their interests, we pay really close attention to what gaps there are so what perspectives are not being represented,” Mills said. “So overall, just looking at a very well rounded collection.”
Last year, Mills received $5,000 for books. This year, the minimum will be $32,000 solely for books.
All of the media center coordinators attended the Pitt County Schools school board meeting on Monday, April 3 to show their gratitude for this grant.
