A Drive to Help Kids

Twelve-year-old Brandon Keefe has spent a quarter of his life filling bookshelves with tales of adventure, once-upon-a-times and morals-of-the-stories, creating happy ending after happy ending.

In three years, Brandon has organized the collection and distribution of roughly 10,000 used children’s books for a Hollywood orphanage and a Canoga Park school.

“Kids need books to learn,” he said. “I just wanted to help out.”

As schools are scrambling to fill library shelves--the Los Angeles Unified School District has just five books per student, 13 below the national average--Brandon’s timing is impeccable.

On Tuesday, cardboard box after cardboard box, bursting with the Berenstain Bears, Goosebumps and other children’s titles, were delivered to Limerick Avenue Elementary School.

Nearly 4,000 books arrived in all, about double the number of books in the school’s sparsely filled library and enough to bring Limerick’s books-per-pupil average from less than four to almost eight.

“I can’t thank him enough,” said Ronni Ephraim, Limerick’s principal. “He’s my hero. These books will help our students so much.”

Helping kids has been Brandon’s goal all along, ever since the day four years ago when he was forced to accompany his mother to a board of directors meeting for the Hollygrove orphanage in Hollywood.

As the board members spoke about the need for a library at the facility and how the price of books far exceeded their budget, the third-grader in the corner devised a plan.

“I figured everyone has books they don’t read anymore,” he said Tuesday, standing near boxes piled almost as high as his head.

So he asked his teacher at Willow Street Elementary School in Agoura Hills if it would be all right to organize a used book drive to help the children of Hollygrove.

Since then Brandon has organized two book drives a year, recruiting volunteers, sorting donations and arranging deliveries.

Last week, when Hollygrove’s library received its last shipment of Brandon’s collections, obtained mostly from students at Brandon’s new school--Chaminade College Preparatory Middle School in Chatsworth--he decided to turn his sights on helping Limerick.

“It’s amazing that someone so young could be so committed to helping others,” Ephraim said. “I hope he realizes just how much he is helping us.”

Ephraim said most of the donated books will be put in the school’s library, but some will go into classroom collections. The additional books also give the principal a chance to achieve one of her professional goals: to have every student take home a different book to read every night.

Brandon’s goals are a bit more ambitious.

“I don’t want schools to have to worry about having enough library books,” he said as a small army of Limerick fifth-graders unloaded boxes and organized the books by grade level.

“If everyone helps out, they won’t have to.”