Issued:  2025-2026

Type:  Building grant

Amount:  $500

Reach:  All Cottonwood students

Applicant(s):  Bethany Fox

Description:

This grant will allow us to better serve students in several ways. The first is the purchase of a book cart for our K/1 students. These learners are scheduled to come to the library once a week. They are able to come daily, but it's a long walk, and sending a five-year-old on a trek to the library takes time out of the classroom. Loading up a book cart and taking it down to the K/1 hallway for 15 minutes each morning for checkout, it puts new books in the hands of students more often. We currently have a cart "rigged" for this purpose, but really need something that is easy to wheel down and can hold ample options for our readers. We compared numbers from last year and this year, and we now have a 119% increase in K/1 circulations as we have made access easier. We are excited about students reading literature (fiction and non-fiction) that they LOVE on a daily basis, and this is the easiest way to get new books to them. There’s no doubt they love coming to the library cart!

Our second request is for a smaller cart. This cart would have fiction and non-fiction options pulled for each grade level that tie into what they are learning in class. For example, our fourth-grade students are learning about Medieval times, so we pulled books ranging from knights, castles, Excalibur, archers, the Plague, medieval jobs, and King Arthur and put them in a bin to easily access if they desired to learn more. Students saw variety and could choose exactly what they wanted to read to expand their learning. We would like for it to be a wheeled cart so if we need to locate it outside classrooms for easy access while researching a topic, it will be easy to do so.