Friday, December 26, 2003
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Friday, December 26, 2003 |
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Crabapple kids collect books for needy students By J. FRANK LYNCH Crabapple Lane in Peachtree City is Fayette County’s newest elementary school, the shiny and gleaming model for all other schools yet to come, officials say. Its 450 students learn in bright classrooms and walk down spotless hallways, lined with creative and colorful artwork. They check books out of a state-of-the-art media center that comes complete with an in-house TV studio where each morning, students report the day’s school news reading from teleprompters. Nearby, they have access weekly to a computer lab full of Gateway computers and loaded with the most current technology. When it’s time for recess, they don’t just head to the playground, but spend time with certified phys-ed teachers in the school’s comfortable full-size gym with rubber floor. As fortunate as they are, the Crabapple students are learning an important lesson in helping the less fortunate this holiday season, said Principal Doe Evans. Through an effort to help improve classroom instruction at an unnamed school district in South Georgia, teachers at Crabapple learned of the vast needs of that county’s single elementary school, which enrolls 1,200 students in a facility far inferior to Fayette County’s buildings. “They went down there overnight to help these teachers learn to integrate special ed instruction into their regular classroom lessons,” said Evans, who opened Crabapple on a wing and prayer last August, getting occupancy permits just days before students arrived. When it came time to return to Peachtree City, the Crabapple teachers handed over to their peers lesson plans they had prepared which included a key element of Fayette County’s curriculum: Send books home with students and have them read, read, read. But there aren’t nearly enough books to meet the needs of all 1,200 students in this county, the local teachers were told. When it came time to brainstorm the first-ever holiday project for Crabapple’s kids, somebody suggested collecting new books of all sorts and donating them to the community down south. The rest, as they say, is history. As of Monday, about 500 books had been brought in, and another 1,000 small paperback storybooks had been donated by Scholastic Press, Evans said. She hopes to ship the books to South Georgia sometime before Christmas, with the UPS Store at Kedron Village already donating the cost to send 10 boxes. It will take more books and more boxes if the Crabapple kids are to meet their goal of 1,200 books. Contributions from the community are welcome. “We’ll continue to take them as long as people bring them in,” Evans said. If interested in donating to the Crabapple book project, contact Evans at the school at 770-487-5425 or go online at www.fcboe.org/schoolhp/crabapple/index.htm.
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