It’s that time again (sort of).
If you’ve ever shopped at an Indigo bookstore (and if you’re reading this article on this web site, odds are pretty good you have), you’ve probably been asked if you want to donate to their Love of Reading Literacy Foundation. which raises money for public school libraries across Canada through a number of initiatives. For instance, 1% of proceeds from kids, young adult and teen books purchased go towards the Love of Reading program, as does 100% of all donations made online and in person at stores. Indigo distributes those donations to public elementary schools across Canada that need some help (a number that has tragically climbed the last few years) through grants. Bayshore public school here in Ottawa received a forty thousand dollar grant last May. At least that’s how it’s done for most of the year.
For three weeks every fall, individual Indigo and Chapters’ stores “adopt” local schools and raise specifically for them. The “Adopt-A-School” fundraiser normally runs from mid-September until early October but was moved back to give schools and the stores that have adopted them more time to co-ordinate. This year the Adopt-A-School campaign began October 10th and runs until October 31st.
It’s never been an easy time for school libraries, but it’s been even tougher the last few years. Everyone is still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, but school libraries are suffering twice as much. Government funding for all public institutions have been negatively impacted and funding shortfalls for public schools in Ontario ran well over a billion dollars for several years coming out of the pandemic. And while Ontario increased its school funding by billions of dollars this fiscal year, plenty of experts feel this increase will fail to match the stratospheric rate of inflation. Libraries are the first casualty of funding cuts ten times out of ten. It’s a grim reality that libraries can’t afford to replace books falling apart or are so old they’ve become irrelevant. And just about every public school in Ontario shares the same librarian with one or two other schools in the same board.
But while school funding cuts have always been an Olympic sport (at least during most of our lifetimes), COVID’s assault on children’s libraries has another deadly prong. When schools went into lockdown, with many going eighteen months or more before opening their doors again, hundreds of books simply never came back. Because the students never came back and there’s been no government help to replace those books. If you saw how many schools in Canada, one of the richest counties in the world, received zero provincial or public funding for any new library books, you’d throw up a little in your mouth. Just to add a little extra salt to the gaping wound, the fundraisers many schools relied on to make up some of the funding slack every year were cancelled due to public health measures. No Scholastic book fairs. No bake sales. Nothing but empty book shelves.
We love to say that children are our future but we rarely act like it, preferring immediate convenience and political indifference instead.
But things have grown ugly on another front; we’re living in an age of rampant book bans and unchecked, venomous harassment. In the last year we’ve watched people screaming that drag queens are evil groomers trying to victimize children morph into dogmatically possessed mobs frothing at the mouth, firmly believing that school teachers are deviants trying to convince children to flip their genders and governments are in on the “conspiracy.” In case you never thought you’d see the day when teachers and librarians and school administrators regularly receive death threats from “concerned” citizens, well your currently living in that timeline right now. Even Prime Minister Trudeau had a fanatic screaming in his face, accusing him of being a pedophile not too long ago (you don’t have to like Trudeau or his policies to admit that kind of behaviour is light years beyond the acceptable pale). And it doesn’t look like it’s going to get any better any time soon.
Things were bleak for children’s literacy during the best of times. These are not the best of times. That’s where the Love of Reading Foundation and Adopt-A-School comes in.
Even if it was a thousand times bigger, Indigo couldn’t solve the funding crisis for public school libraries and the truth is the political powers that can have little to no interest to do so. School kids have no political currency. They don’t vote, they don’t pay taxes and they can’t donate to political campaigns. Quite often they’re little more than a political football in yet another chapter of our endless and pointless culture wars. But only a cynic would throw their hands up in surrender and people can still step up. Donating a dollar or two might not feel like a lot, but you’ve heard of death by a thousand paper cuts? Now is a good time to start thinking about victory by a thousand steps. Things just might get a little better one school, one library, one smile at a time. We don’t know if a thousand steps can move an entire country, but now is as good a time as any to find out. And you can help.
Donations to specific schools can be made in stores and online to the general fund here. The Adopt-A-School campaign ends October 31st.
Image via www.indigo.ca
Shayne Kempton works for Indigo and is a Love of Reading ambassador. And please, for the love of Batman, Baby Jesus and Bill Murray, start your Christmas shopping now instead of leaving it until 4 PM Christmas Eve. If that’s you, no one likes you.
