Lesson in Sharing Is One for the Books

Thaddeus Jackson knows what it’s like to grow up without books.

It’s not that he ever felt deprived but in his family’s South-Central Los Angeles home--three bedrooms, nine kids, two hard-working parents--”we just didn’t have that advantage when I was a kid.”

“I didn’t grow up with the enjoyment of sitting down with a good book. That whole concept . . . reading for pleasure--that was rather foreign to me.”

Now, as principal of LaSalle Elementary--in a Southwest Los Angeles neighborhood very much like the one where he grew up--he is working to create a very different world for the 1,000 students at his school.

And his partners in the project are hundreds of suburban kids who probably can’t even imagine a childhood without books.

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This is another one of those heartwarming stories about “haves” reaching out to “have-nots,” sharing the bounty of their lives with those less fortunate, less blessed.

But the bounty this time is more than just the 12,000 books that students at Manhattan Beach’s Robinson Elementary collected for their counterparts at LaSalle . . . enough books to fill LaSalle’s empty library, to stock every classroom shelf, to give each child a book or two or three to take home.

There is a less tangible--but more enduring--legacy to this gift . . . the hope that the stories that unfold in the pages of these books will be like sparks that ignite a lifelong love of reading for the children of LaSalle.

Robinson launched its book drive last spring, after parents Helen Cadrone and Laurie Bath read about the work of Becky Constantino, whose Access Books project enlists suburban schools to help replenish neglected libraries at inner-city schools.

It wasn’t castoffs they were after. “This wasn’t a ‘clean off your bookshelves’ kind of thing,” explained Bath. “It was a way for our kids to share an experience, something they loved, that another child would love.”

Give “a book that taught you something, that has taken you somewhere new, that made you laugh,” their fliers said. “Give a book that is important to you.”

They hoped each of the school’s 350 students would bring in five books, which would have netted almost 1,800 books for LaSalle. But Robinson students began lugging in sacks of paperbacks, each inscribed with a note, explaining why that book was loved.

“We were surprised, but maybe we shouldn’t have been,” Cadrone said. “The kids at our school are voracious readers, surrounded by books. I think the idea of sharing stories they love with other kids--kids who had no [school] library, no Barnes & Noble, none of the advantages we enjoy . . . that was an easy thing for our community to embrace.”

Within weeks, Robinson students had collected more than 5,000 books. Then several thousand more were donated by local bookstores and vendors that supply the school’s classrooms and library . . . so many volumes that Cadrone and Bath had to haul them to LaSalle in a trailer donated by U-Haul.

When they delivered the books, students, teachers and parents from both schools spent a weekend working together to paint and refurbish LaSalle’s library.

“And there were these little girls coming up to the table while we unpacked, looking through the books, asking, ‘Can I have this to take home, please, please, please?’ ” Cadrone said. “And it felt so good to say, ‘Yes, please, please do.’ ”

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Until last month, LaSalle’s library had been closed for years. And maybe it’s no coincidence that the school’s students have consistently landed in the bottom tier in statewide school achievement ratings.

Reading is the cornerstone of any good instructional program, principal Jackson knows. “And if we raise our children’s reading level, we can improve their performance in school.”

But it’s not just about higher test scores and better grades, it’s about exposing kids to different worlds, broadening their perspective in a way few things can do better than books.

“One of the things we have to do is promote enjoyment of reading among the kids,” Jackson says.

“In my family, my father was illiterate, my mother had gone as far as high school. They didn’t read to us. We never thought of reading as something you did for pleasure.”

Once he graduated from Fremont High and headed for college on a basketball scholarship, Jackson’s literary deficiencies began weighing him down.

“I suffered in a lot of ways,” he recalls. “I went to college because of my athletic skills, but I was at a disadvantage in my classes. There were people who’d gone to Europe and different places or at least had the advantage of reading about them. I had none of that . . . had never read Shakespeare, poetry. . . .

“I’d missed out on so much. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized that you can connect to someone else’s life by reading their story, and I learned to see the world from different perspectives.”

Now Jackson tries to share that lesson with his students, as he makes the rounds of classrooms, reading aloud about penguins and baseball and Cinderella . . . “anything, as long as I can show them how much fun it is, how much enjoyment you can have reading a story.”

And whenever he can, he presses books into the hands of parents and asks them to promise to read to their children or to let their children read to them.

“These books from Manhattan Beach, they’re not just going to sit on the shelves,” Jackson declares. “They’re going to motivate these children to want more, to be more. . . . They’re going to connect them to the whole big world out there.”

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Sandy Banks’ column is published on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.