Book drive finds volumes of success

A Toledo native's campaign to collect books for a school in rural Chile received a big boost earlier this year from students at Jackman Elementary School.
Students collected about 3,500 books for the campaign over the course of two weeks in February. The book drive was started by Craig Beaker, a Miami University senior who volunteered last summer as an English teacher at a school near the Chilean capital of Santiago.
Beaker said he was working as a translator over the summer when a friend of the family he was staying with approached him about teaching English at the school, which is about 45 minutes outside Santiago.
"It's kind of a small rural area, pretty underdeveloped," Beaker said.
The school is near several wineries, Beaker said, and learning English is one way residents can secure good jobs in the wine industry.
"The students ranged from maybe 8 years old to 60 years old, so there was a wide range of students that were being taught at the school," he said.
Resources were limited, though. The school is one large open room, Beaker said, and the library consisted of three bookshelves.
After returning to the U.S., Beaker started the Cordova Foundation for Children, with the goal of collecting books to help students at the school learn English.
In addition to the Miami University chapters of Kappa Alpha Theta, Alpha Xi Delta and Kappa Alpha Order, Beaker enlisted the help of his sister, Carissa Glesser, who teaches kindergarten at Jackman.
Glesser said students competed to see which classroom could bring in the most books. Every day, the top three classrooms for the day would be announced over the intercom, building excitement around the two-week campaign.
The top two classrooms, both of which received a pizza party for their efforts, were separated by only two books: Students in Bethany Petras' second-grade classroom brought in 1,044 books and Kelly McCullough's second-graders brought in 1,042, Glesser said.
"I never realized how much of a success it would be," Glesser said. "We thought maybe 1,000 books, but we went way beyond what was expected, so it was really neat."
Jackman principal Kristine Martin said the school, which has about 400 students, takes on some kind of community service project every year.
By the end of two weeks, Jackman students had collected about 3,500 books — nearly half of the book drive's total of about 7,500.
Beaker said about 1,000 of those books have already been shipped to Chile. He said he will try to fill the library at the school where he taught, then move on to others.
The books are being warehoused at Container Graphics Corp. in Toledo, where Beaker worked off and on for several years and where his father is general manager.
"It's kind of a family adventure, I suppose," he said.
Beaker, a 2004 graduate of Northview High School in Sylvania, has a double major in Latin American studies and diplomacy and foreign affairs, with a minor in Spanish. He plans to attend law school at Loyola University Chicago, and said he hopes to return to Chile in summer 2009.