Volunteer, Friend Enjoy Wonder of Reading

My friend Angie Mayorga and I have squirreled ourselves away at a table behind a partition, and she is reading to me from a book.

“i-i-I-I-I-I learned to jump from my friend the DOG,” she reads.

“i-i-I-I-I-I learned to walk from my friend the CAT.”

Angie is 7. She has shining hair and eager dark eyes, an 11-month-old sister named Michelle and, in El Salvador, a 12-year-old brother.

She also has a way of reading the first word of each sentence with a songful, elongated swoop that starts low and rises like a bird taking wing, and of enunciating the sentence’s last word with emphatic finality: “i-i-I-I-I-I learned to march from my friend the ROOSTER . . . .”

The day before, I took a crash training course in how to be a Wonder of Reading community volunteer, and now Angie is taking me out for a shakedown cruise. It’s been a long time since I’ve read with a small child, my own children having disappeared into adults. But sitting there with Angie, listening to her voice and watching her eyes gulp each word in turn, I feel a familiar cocoon of well-being being spun around us.

That’s not all I feel. The sunny, calm, booky quiet of the library at Kester Avenue Elementary School is itself practically tangible.

Until last year, the library at Kester was like that of nearly every other elementary school in the Los Angeles Unified School District. That is to say, it was a cramped, forlorn classroom stocked with many books so out of date they were useless.

Kester, however, lucked out. It was one of the first of the district’s primary schools chosen by the nonprofit Wonder of Reading foundation for library renovation.

Today, Kester’s library is twice its original size and handsomely carpeted. It has new bookshelves, private tutoring stations, a small amphitheater for group reading and $10,000 worth of new books.

Wonder of Reading provides $20,000 raised from individual and corporate donors, and challenges a school to raise $20,000 more. Of the total, three-fourths is used for reconstruction and the remainder for new books. Finally, the foundation trains community volunteers to work one-on-one every week with children whose reading skills need a boost.

“What we do is act as a catalyst,” says foundation director Dori Hairrell. “Give the school a nice library, and that encourages them to have fund-raisers and keep adding to the book stocks. It focuses their efforts on the library.”

The 4-year-old foundation was started by the Forman family, owners of Pacific Theaters Corp. Now a free-standing entity, it has redone libraries at 10 Los Angeles school district elementaries in all areas of the city. Eight more are to be reconstructed during 1998.

There are 420 elementary schools in the district, Hairrell says, “and if we have time and money, we’re hoping to hit them all.”

School libraries in California, home to some of the worst scholastic reading levels in the United States, have hit bottom. Nationally, there is an average of one trained school librarian for every 909 students. In California, the average is one for every 6,248 students (compared with the California prison system’s average of one librarian for every 815 inmates).

In Los Angeles Unified, no elementary school has a trained librarian. Moreover, whereas the national average of school library books per pupil is 18, the district’s is five.

L.A. schools have begun their climb out of the muck. Last October, the district’s Board of Education resolved to place at least one trained librarian in every elementary school within five years. In addition, the board allocated $4 per student for new library books. for the first time in recent memory, the state of California this year is providing money for such books, ranging from 96 cents per student in the upper grades to $2.46 for students in grades four through six.

The figures are anemic, however, compared with the average cost of $18 for a new library book. Bonnie O’Brian, the district’s supervisor of library services, estimates it will take $200 million and 10 million new books to bring all city schools up to the national books-per-pupil average.

“The important thing,” she says, “is that people are beginning to recognize what needs to be done, and beginning to work toward that goal. An effort is being made that has not been made in my lifetime.”

No part of that effort is more vital than the one Wonder of Reading has taken upon itself.

If reading is to flourish among children, there must be alluring physical spaces where its value is enshrined. But something even more important is at stake in giving kids ready access to good libraries.

Libraries are oases of quiet in the ceaseless electronic din that engulfs today’s children. Only amid quiet can they communicate with themselves. Quiet is where individuality is confirmed and creativity is born.

Reading is one of the most valuable forms of that self-communication, requiring the kid to be a real partner in his own edification or entertainment, controlling the pace, mixing her unique imagination with the words, actively investing self.

The danger is not just that libraryless children will become indifferent readers, or even hapless workers, but that they’ll become shallow people, easily manipulated and not attuned to the richness of their own existence.

Libraries, places of both quiet and reading, are possibly more important than ever. I think of this as Angie sing-songs through her book:

“i-i-I-I-I-I learned to climb from my--Look, I can see the little girl’s underwear in this picture. It’s white, hee-hee--from my friend the MONKEY . . . “

This close to a kid this little, it’s easy to become tipsy with sentimentality. All that instinct toward joy. All that chirpy curiosity.

But in such an intimate circumstance you also sense the true enormity of the betrayal that is insufficient education, which we in California seem to accept with a shrug, and the urgent necessity of resisting it.

“i-i-I-I-I-I learned to read from my friend the BOOK,” Angie reads.

“i-i-I-I-I-I learned to love from a friend like YOU.”

I listen to her in the benign quiet of Kester School library and what I really hear is, there is hope.