School to donate 6,000 books to Katrina relief Volunteers still need to raise $1,000 for shipping BY CHRIS GAETANO Staff Writer EDISON - This may be one for the books. Students, faculty and staff at John Adams Middle School in Edison have collected over 6,000 books for school children in New Orleans over the course of five weeks. The effort, coordinated by the school's library and its student volunteers, will send the books to the New Orleans Recovery School District, the schools within which lost nearly all of their books during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. "The school district in New Orleans had a real challenge there, with their school libraries typically on the first floor - [they are] first to get flooded, and have thousands of books and are subject to mold, so entire library collections were just devastated for all the schools," said Ellen Whit, the John Adams Middle School librarian. Whit, who spearheaded the effort with the help of student volunteers, said that she had gone to New Orleans to help with recovery efforts in June 2006, and since then had continued to work on volunteer activities related to that city. She said that several students, primarily on the library council, had expressed a recent interest in completing a community service project of some sort, and the problems New Orleans' schools were having with stocking books came to mind. And so, on Dec. 12, the call went through the school for people to donate books to the cause. The response, said Whit, was great. "We are now at over 6,000 books to send down there, which is quite an accomplishment. The whole school was very involved, and literally hundreds of students and the faculty as well brought in books, so we're proud of the contributions the faculty and kids havemade toward this," said Whit. Whit said that they have received a large number of books for elementary school children, many of them books students themselves had read before, as well as a few for preschoolers. The students are sorting the books and placing them in boxes before shipping them out. They are also engaged in fundraising efforts, because shipping all the books to New Orleans, estimated at about 60 boxes in all, is expected to cost at least $1,000. "We collected more books than we dreamed, so it's going to be a little more expensive than we expected," said Whit. Still, she is glad that the students have become so involved with volunteering, and said that she hopes that they can serve as amodel for other students in other schools. "I just think that we hope that this effort really can be kind of a model for other schools and community organizations to really think about whether they could do this book collection drive for schools in New Orleans. They are looking for schoolage books, and I know many families hold onto themand would love to help out," said Whit.