Speaking of libraries — and who hasn’t lately in Henderson — the North Carolina State Library delivered some good news for Vance County in the latest round of grants under the state Library Services and Technology Act.
The state grants are going to the H. Leslie Perry Memorial Library and two secondary schools, Eaton-Johnson Middle School and Western Vance High School, and total nearly $25,000. In addition, Western Vance is getting $5,000 from the Laura Bush Foundation for America’s Libraries.
Western Vance was one of 160 nationwide recipients of grants from the Laura Bush Foundation, which announced the winners of $777,000 on June 2. All of the grantees are school libraries trying to expand their collections of books.
“I think they were No. 66 on the list,” Marty Smith, Vance County Schools’ director of strategic planning, told the Vance Board of Education at its regular meeting Monday night.
According to a news release at the foundation’s Web site, Western Vance is one of 38 high schools in the nation and one of seven schools in North Carolina to get grants for the 2005-06 school year, and it is receiving the maximum award of $5,000.
“Every student benefits from having access to more books,” Bush said in the news release. “They’re a source of entertainment, a source of knowledge, a source of inspiration, and they’re important to academic success. I hope the books purchased with these grants will bring students as much joy as books have always brought to me.”
Schools Superintendent Norm Shearin praised Western Vance Principal Eric Pierce for his initiative in seeking grants to produce a quality library at the high school, which is a second-chance route to a diploma.
“Mr. Pierce and his staff worked very hard on this,” Shearin said, adding that Smith helped the Western staff with the grant process.
The state LSTA grant to Western is for $2,675. It is a School Library Collection Development Grant, meant “to provide assistance to school media centers in building strong curriculum-related print collections that are accurate, current and attractive,” according to the LSTA grant descriptions for 2005-06.
The collection development grants require a 50 percent match, so Western Vance will need $1,337.50 in local money to collect the state funds. Smith said the local match will not be a problem but did not elaborate.
The State Library announced the LSTA grants Friday. Of 148 applications, 133 recipients were approved for a total of $3,763,999.
The maximum grant for school library collection building — the category in which Western Vance won — was $10,000, and that’s what Eaton-Johnson Middle School is getting. The school will need $5,000 in local money for a match.
Tem Blackburn, general counsel for Variety Wholesalers in Henderson and the chairman of the state Library Commission, has said plenty of LSTA money is available for school libraries as long as they can provide the matching money. The match could come from school fundraising, the school board or a third party such as the Vance Education Fund.
Applications for the school library grants under the LSTA were due in February.
Eaton-Johnson’s library grant did not come up at Monday’s school board meeting, perhaps because the award is provisional. The notification letter is supposed to explain the requirements or conditions that must be met for the grant to be final.
There’s nothing provisional about the technology planning grant for the Perry Library. The Henderson library is one of four in the state to receive such a grant for 2005-06. The grant totals $12,000, and it comes at an opportune time: The Perry Library is planning a large expansion of the use and availability of computers and technology for its move into the new building.
A tech support person/programmer is one of the library board’s budget priorities for the coming year. That $33,000 position is funded for only two months under the county and city budget proposals, and Blackburn spoke to both governing boards last week about the immediate need to hire that person. He got no public response from either board.