“Sharing the joy of reading.”
We recently sat down with Lisa Schalla, a teacher and the National Honor Society advisor at the American School of Puerto Vallarta. She talked to us about Leer y Crecer (“Read & Grow”), a reading advocacy program of which she’s the head.
Leer y Crecer started in the spring of 2005 with a simple idea: to share the joy of reading with children. During that semester, five NHS students and two teachers from the American School visited Escuela Francisco Villa on Thursday afternoons and read to the elementary students. The children’s response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic – the members of Leer y Crecer discovered that local children had a real desire to read, but had limited access to books.
The program continued to grow. Leer y Crecer next donated 2000 books to twenty local schools, and started holding reading workshops to help both teachers and NHS students read to children more effectively. The program’s next step, however, was one that would come to define it. Lack of books was definitely a problem for local schools, but an even bigger problem was lack of space for the books that they did have; many schools didn’t have space for libraries. Leer y Crecer helped Escuela Francisco Villa convert a storage room into a school library, covered books and added pockets to the back covers, and implemented systems for organizing and checking out the books. Today, the school’s library has been open for three years, and it’s estimated that fifty percent of the students have books checked out at any one time.
When asked about Leer y Crecer’s goals for the future, Lisa Schalla said, “The big goal is to continue in many different ways according to what the needs of the community are and what the vision of our volunteers is.” The program’s current projects include continuing to read with local children, holding monthly support meetings and raising funds for teachers from eight rural schools, and helping the nearby town of San Vicente implement a library in their school.
It’s estimated that Leer y Crecer has already benefited over 7,000 students in thirty-five schools, and all this hard work hasn’t gone unnoticed – the program received an award from Rotary International in 2008 and the Community Service Award from the Tri-Association in 2009.
If you’re interested in helping, there are many opportunities. You can volunteer for as little or as long as you like, doing things such as reading with children, implementing school libraries, helping with English classes, or working in libraries. Any donations are also appreciated; just to give an idea, $500 can be used to buy 100 books, and a new school library can be implemented for $1000. Please direct all inquiries to Lisa Schalla; see the contact information below.
