Wake book drive still needs you

Organizers of the 2016 WAKE Up and Read book drive have a serious and disheartening problem. The drive is woefully short of its goal of collecting 110,000 books to give to disadvantaged students. Only 21,000 books had been collected as of early this week.

The organizers hope that people will pay attention to this online address: http://wakeupandread.org/. That’s where more information is available about the drive. Organizers want to give each child in elementary schools with large numbers of disadvantaged children 10 books apiece. And the hope is that more books can go to community centers.

Sherri Miller, the Wake County schools’ literacy director, said it is critical that those students in the earliest years of their educations get more books to read. Reading, after all, is the basis for all learning – truly, all of it.

Wake is, at least in many neighborhoods, an affluent county with many parents and grandparents who have books in basements and attics. Now that they are becoming aware of the book shortage, they can go to their places of storage and dig out those books their kids enjoyed and arrange for other kids to enjoy them – and learn from them.

This story was originally published March 2, 2016 at 6:53 PM with the headline "Wake book drive still needs you."