Kiwanis present check to Beach Elementary
Beach Elementary is a little richer in its endeavor to refurnish its school library, thanks to a nonprofit donation by the Kiwanis Club of Fort Myers Beach.
The local Kiwanis organization recently donated $5,000 for the Beach school’s library resources and books. Beach Kiwanis Board of Directors Eric Tibbs presented a check for that amount to Principal Larry Wood, his staff and students on Tuesday, May 10.
“In December, Mr. Wood approached us when we were having our Kiwanis and K-Kids meeting and mentioned the school would like to get new library resources since some go out of date each year,” said Tibbs. “So the Kiwanis board voted that this year we would donate $5,000 to replace older library resources. We will continue to do that in the coming years as well.”
Keeping up with the times -especially from our youths standpoint- is essential.
“If you have books from the early 1990s, and we are now in the 21st century, those resources aren’t current anymore,” said Tibbs. “We need to replace those every couple of years. That’s why we want to contribute $5,000 per year to update resources for the kids.”
Tibbs said future donations would aid in acquiring electronic books.
“We want to make sure we are on board with that. We are planning on buying a couple of electronic resources to test it out and see which ones are right. As the technology catches up with us, we’ll buy more and more of those,” he said.
Wood is happy to receive such donations.
“We are just really thrilled and pleased that the Kiwanis are partnering with our school to provide library resources for the kids. This will go a long way to help us maintain an up-to-date library,” he said. “Our kids are reading at an advanced level.”
The Beach Elementary principal said the school’s fifth graders are reading at the seventh and eighth grade level.
“We need books of high interest for those kids and, with the AR (advance reading) program, the kids have become such veracious readers that we need to continue to provide materials that will be an incentive for them to continue reading,” he said.
Electronic books should help Beach school students gain a good edge before moving on to middle schools.
“We are looking at what is best and feasible to our school,” said Wood. “We don’t know at this point because this is all relatively new to us. Now, with the donated money, Jackie (DeMilia, technical support), Sandy Nelson (retired librarian) and I will look at some of those resources and figure out which books we should be purchasing.”