When I was a first-year teacher, a police officer caught me rooting through a dumpster behind my town’s library. I had scooped up books to grow my high school classroom library a couple of times before, trying my best to be discreet, but this time I got caught.
He asked, “Sir, why are you doing this?” I replied that I was a teacher rescuing books headed to the landfill and explained that my students could borrow them from my classroom library. The officer didn’t want to hear it.
“You are trespassing, and you can’t do this anymore,” he firmly informed me.
I felt completely humiliated. Here we were, two public servants earning a salary provided by local taxes, yet I was the one with my head in the dumpster. Imagine a police officer doing the same to gather a holster, a uniform or handcuffs! Can you picture a mail carrier, a soldier or physician doing a Donors Choose or GoFundMe to get what they need to do the job?
High shelf esteem
In 2001, I began my teaching career in Moorestown, one of the most affluent towns in South Jersey. I taught across the hall from a veteran English teacher in her mid-sixties. She had a sprawling classroom library, accumulated over forty years, with bookcases covering nearly every wall, jammed with books. That library inspired me to dumpster-dive, in addition to hitting up every library book sale. I wanted a wow factor when students and parents entered my dream classroom, cocooned with amazing books.
After a few years, I found myself teaching at Lindenwold High School, located in a town on the opposite end of the socioeconomic spectrum. Most of my ninth graders had third-, fourth- and fifth-grade reading levels. Nearly all the students received free/reduced lunch. I wanted the classroom library wow factor to follow me to my new school, and I doubled down on my book collection.
The moment that started it all
In the spring of 2014, at the end of my senior project class, I asked one of my seniors what she was reading to her two-year-old daughter. She replied that she didn’t read to her baby, saying her child was too little to understand. I went into parent-to-parent mode, earnestly explaining how I began reading to my children on the day they came home from the hospital.
My student responded, “Mr. Abrams, that’s nice, but we don’t do that in my culture.”
I went home that day and reflected on how I could help. Years prior, we had donated outgrown baby and picture books to a big-box thrift store. I knew my friends in my Facebook community had younger children, so I put out a call that I was collecting books for kids in my district.
In no time, people saw the post and started dropping dozens of bags and boxes onto my front porch. I gave a bag of books to my student. After a week, she burst into the classroom with a big smile and declared how much her daughter loved “Harold and the Purple Crayon.” She asked if I had more books!
I was hooked. I sought new ways to create book joy, harvesting very gently used books and giving them to students and teachers who needed them most. Reading “The Book Whisperer” by Donalyn Miller gave me rocket fuel.
This grassroots initiative eventually blossomed into what we now know as BookSmiles.
Fast forward: my former student recently told me that her daughter and her two boys all read well beyond grade level.
The birth of BookSmiles
I started the nonprofit paperwork for BookSmiles in the summer of 2017 after learning about book deserts. A book desert is an area where there is only one book available to every 300 students, and unfortunately there are book deserts all across our region. I figured that addressing two problems simultaneously can lead to better reading outcomes for our children.
The first pernicious problem: tons of gently used children’s books, so many of which look brand new, get destroyed each year in New Jersey. Nearly all find their way to the pulpers or landfill. People donate their books to thrift agencies, but since there is no profit selling books online, they usually get destroyed. Online book sellers perceive them as unprofitable duds.
The second pernicious problem: tens of thousands of New Jersey kids spend the first five years of their lives in bookless homes. No immediate access means no bedtime story with “Goodnight Moon,” no alternatives to TVs and tablets and no chance to hear hundreds of thousands of vocabulary words.
A 2019 article from the Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics by Dr. Jessica Long provides the following research: “Parents who read one picture book with their children every day provide their children with exposure to an estimated 78,000 words each year. Cumulatively, over the five years before kindergarten entry, we estimate that children from literacy-rich homes hear a cumulative 1.4 million more words during storybook reading than children who are never read to.”
Addressing the two problems at once makes sense. Other excellent book-access organizations like Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library and First Book distribute only new books. BookSmiles, on the other hand, diverts millions of quality, used books from the waste stream. Because of our model, it costs us only 60 cents to accept, process and distribute each book.
Teachers as entrepreneurs
From the start, I poured my teacher-superpower into growing the business. It occurred to me early on that the best teachers practice customer service. They treat students like gold, use obstacles and problems as our way to improve, create warm classroom cultures and teach with passion and enthusiasm, even on the hard days.
In a way, the several thousand teachers who have visited BookSmiles think like entrepreneurs. Instead of purchasing new books and spending hours chasing around thrift stores and yard sales, they visit the BookSmiles book bank to stock up on fresh material or facilitate a school book fair by ordering a pallet of BookSmiles books.
How BookSmiles works
Teacher-Take Store: Teachers from around New Jersey and Philadelphia have always been our most robust and enthusiastic distributors. They register each year with a $35 donation and flood the book bank Sunday mornings and Wednesday afternoons, filling several bags with handpicked books for their classroom libraries or to give away to their students.
The Fair Book Fair: My students admitted to me that corporate book fairs made them feel poor and that too many books were priced beyond what they could afford. So, they settled for trinkets like pencils, stickers, erasers or nothing at all. Big-hearted elementary school teachers told me that they often spent $100 or more to get their kids something from the book fairs.
This inspired us to start the Fair Book Fair program. Schools in high-poverty districts can receive enough books to give each child three books: it’s three for free! Here are the tiers:
Books are free if a school or teacher vehicle takes up to 24 cases of books (about 2400 books) from the book bank.
If BookSmiles delivers the books, we have a suggested donation of $500. Put NJEA Public Education Partnership (PEP) grants to good use!
BookSmiles will deliver the books to the school and provide a team member to spearhead the book fair for $1,000. BookSmiles asks the school to provide a few helpers.
The next chapter
BookSmiles has outgrown our 4,300 square foot location in Pennsauken, and will soon move to a 14,000 square-foot facility in Cherry Hill, where we will distribute up to four million books each year! But the goal isn’t just growth for its own sake. It’s about increasing access and ensuring that more children, in more communities, have books of their own.
The impact of a single book can be profound. A book can spark curiosity, build confidence, strengthen literacy, create connections and sometimes, it can change the trajectory of a youngster’s life.
Learn more about BookSmiles at njea.org/BookSmiles.
Video by Danielle Earle, NJEA Communications.
You can help
Follow BookSmiles on social media: Help spread the word among educators who need great books for their students. Get notified about some of our giveaways, like winning a class set of “Oh, The Places You’ll Go!” or “The Giving Tree.”
Start a book drive: Donate your grown-up or children’s books to us. We trade several tons of grown-up books each week for several tons of kids’ books, so your donation truly helps us irrigate book deserts. Spearhead a book drive in your school. If you gather more than 5,000 books, we will dispatch our truck for a pickup.
Sign up for volunteer sorting: Go to booksmiles.org and sign up for summertime sorting. As you sort, feel free to set aside books you find for your students.
NJEA members on BookSmiles
Theresa Schaefer-Dolan, school library media specialist and ESL teacher Brooklawn School District
I heard about BookSmiles during the pandemic. It was during my first year as a school media specialist. Working in a Title I school district, I knew many students were without books. When I discovered BookSmiles, Larry was running the operation from a rented storage unit. I pulled up to the unit, was asked what ages I would be serving and less than two minutes later two large boxes filled with hundreds of books were placed in my SUV. I dressed as a fairy and left students’ books on their doorsteps. It truly felt magical.
It’s amazing how BookSmiles keeps improving and I look forward to continuing and growing my relationship with this amazing organization as they expand their innovative ideas to get books in the hands of New Jersey students in need.
Emma Adams, preschool teacher Brooklawn School District
For Christmas, my aunt got me a year’s membership for BookSmiles. She knew that I am trying to build my classroom library. I had such a great experience with BookSmiles. As a newer teacher it has been a great, inexpensive resource to help build my classroom library. Every volunteer was so kind and helpful with helping me find books for my class that were preschool appropriate. They have a great selection of books to choose from. BookSmiles has been such a great resource for me as a younger teacher and I can’t recommend it enough.
Alyssa Brownrigg, kindergarten teacher Eastampton Township School District
BookSmiles has made such a huge difference in my kindergarten classroom. Because of their donations, my classroom library is now full of engaging, high-quality books that my students are genuinely excited to read. It’s been amazing to watch them pick up books independently and develop a love for reading at such a young age. For many of my students, these books are opening doors to new experiences and ideas they may not have had access to otherwise. I’m so grateful for BookSmiles and the impact they’ve had on my students and our classroom community.