The Writers’ League of Texas is pleased to spread the word about this terrific book drive organized by Margaret and Adrian Eissler. We hope you’ll consider donating a book to this great cause!
– Sara
Roadrunner Reads is a book drive benefitting J. Frank Dobie Middle School in northeast Austin. We invite central Texas writers to donate extra copies of your works to our school. Any number of books helps! Our website, www.roadrunnerreads.org, will recognize donating writers by linking from your name to any website where our visitors can access your works. With several thousand web visitors expected, we hope to give your marketing efforts a shot in the arm while using your donations to pique our students’ interest in writing. Email adrian@roadrunnerreads.org to arrange a donation and web link.
The Roadrunner Reads book drive is a charitable project organized by Margaret and Adrian Eissler. Margaret teaches 6th grade English at Dobie. Adrian is a staff lawyer at the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. The problem we address is the disturbing lack of reading materials in the classrooms
and homes of our students. Our teachers typically have sufficient funds for one class set of books, which four or five classes must then share. Students therefore are not able to take books home. Approximately 80% of our students report fewer than four books in their entire home, and nearly half
have never personally owned a book. Libraries are available, of course, but our kids aren’t going!
As one small step toward fostering a culture of literacy, we want to allow our students to keep at least one of the books they study in their English or reading classes. These may be books they study together as a class, or books they choose and read individually. Our website lists several specific titles of which we would like to build class sets, but we also encourage donation of any individual fiction or nonfiction titles between 2nd and 12th grade reading levels.
Our public outreach begins with our appearance on the KXAN (NBC) weekend news at 7:40am on Saturday, February 5th. Then email and networking campaigns get underway and our roadrunner “float” takes to the streets from 4 to 6pm from February 7th to 17th. We estimate that our efforts will net a few thousand visitors to our website. We’d like to extend that publicity to promote the works of central Texas writers. Please send an email to adrian@roadrunnerreads.org to get in on the fun!
– Margaret and Adrian Eissler
