Thanks to your overwhelming support and the efforts of our partners throughout the district,
we have collected and shipped 11,000 books to the African Library Project!

Since October 2009, students, teachers, interns, families, and community members have worked to collect children’s books and teacher resources to establish primary and secondary school libraries through the African Library Project (www.africanlibraryproject.org).  In many classrooms, this project has been integrated with the curriculum as “service learning,” a teaching and learning strategy that engages and empowers students, enhances curriculum, and teaches civic responsibility. What began as a project to collect 2,000 books quickly became a community-wide mission and learning experience that ultimately will result in the creation of 11 new libraries in Swaziland, southern Africa.  As of April 2010, the books have been sorted, packed, and sent to a central location in Louisiana, from which they will be containerized and shipped to our recipient schools.

We owe the success of this project to the many volunteers from Easterly Parkway, Ferguson Township, Park Forest, and Radio Park Elementary Schools, Mount Nittany and Park Forest Middle Schools, the Delta Program, and Penn State University who helped with donations, sorting, packing, communication, and fundraising.  Thank you for giving of your time to share the love of reading and the power of literacy around the world: together we do make a difference!

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The AFRICAN LIBRARY PROJECT

As part of our commitment to service-learning, Park Forest Elementary has teamed with a non-profit organization called the African Library Project to create primary school libraries in two villages in Swaziland, southern Africa. The African Library Project works to improve literacy rates in rural Africa by pairing villages with sponsor organizations in the US. Starting in October, PFE will be sponsoring a book drive to collect and ship 1,000 gently used books that will stock a Kindergarten-Grade 4 library in our assigned village in Manzini, Swaziland.

We encourage families to look through their homes for gently used books that can be donated to this effort. Although we will accept all donations, we particularly need:
  • Baby board books
  • Children's picture books
  • Children's fiction and non-fiction
  • Early readers
  • Juvenile literature
  • Children's dictionaries
  • Children's encyclopedias (less than 15 years old)
  • Accurate atlases
  • Thesauruses
  • Teacher resources
Books can be donated during parent conferences or sent to school with students at any time. Please note that we encourage paperback books wherever possible, as these are less expensive to ship. In addition, all books received in excess of our goal will be donated to children in our local community.

To learn more about the African Library Project and the involvement of SCASD schools, please view the below public service announcement specially created for our website or visit the African Library Project website at http://www.africanlibraryproject.org.

Thank you for helping us to provide access to books where there has been none before. Together we can make a difference!

If the below public service movie hasn't begun playing, please double-click inside black box.


Last Modified on April 17, 2012