NJ Elementary School Library Wins $50,000 Grant for Disaster Relief

James Monroe Elementary School, in Edison, NJ, was destroyed by fire in March, 2014. School Librarian Vera Beal applied for and won the American Association of School Librarians and Dollar General Literacy Foundation’s Beyond Words Disaster Relief Grant, which will furnish $50,000 for the re-establishment of the school’s library media program.

In her application for the grant, Beal wrote, “I watched in dismay and fright as the flames rolled out of the windows of our school library. The entire collection of books, as well as all of our media equipment, was destroyed. All of these wonderful amenities of the school year have been erased due to the fire.”

In September, the school, its students, faculty and staff, will have been relocated for a second time, to a former parochial school, which will be James Monroe Elementary’s home until the completion of a new building on the school’s original site.

“The school that we will inhabit in September has a large area designated as the library. However, the books that we have collected so far will fill only one tenth of the space,” explains Beal. “The surrounding communities have held book drives for us, and I have personally weeded through these books separating the usable from the inappropriate. We are still left with a small percentage of what we originally had.”

School Principal Lynda Zapoticzny traveled to San Francisco to receive the grant citation in person at ALA’s Annual Meeting last month. Congratulations to the James Monroe Elementary community on this major step forward to rebuilding their school library program, and best wishes for the school community as a whole.