Gold Hill Elementary shares book bounty with Western Slope 'sister'
One tiny school reaches across Colorado's mountains to help another
By John Marinelli
For the Camera
POSTED: 11/24/2018 05:31:15 PM MST | UPDATED: 5 MONTHS AGO
Two small schools separated by hundreds of miles were connected through the act of giving Saturday, when a library's worth of books were handed off in the heart of Boulder.
With the wind whipping up leaves and sweeping bitter cold over the town, Sue Kidder of Gold Hill Elementary met up with Katrina McGee, a reading teacher at Pleasant View Elementary, at Boulder Public Library's main branch to hand over five full boxes of books.
Both schools are quite small, each having two rooms and serving relatively remote communities, which Kidder says makes the donation all the more impactful.
"Your budget is allotted per pupil," she said. "When you've got a small school, you've got a small budget."
The books Gold Hill is giving away are organized into a special kind of collection, known as a guided reading library, which has books scaling in difficulty so that new readers can blossom into bookworms.
After Kidder's school received new books this year when the Boulder Valley School District updated its language arts materials, she and others at Gold Hill wanted to make sure that the library went to a school like theirs that really needed it.
"I figured this would go to a regular-sized school," she said. "To actually find that there is a school out there pretty much the same size as ours was exciting."
The gift was made all the more meaningful by the fact that Gold Hill community members and parents were the ones who originally raised the funds for the approximately $13,000 library.
Kidder recalled when her school originally got the books, "It was unbelievable to go from a teeny shelf of books to a guided reading library."
Those at Pleasant View Elementary may well be the ones in disbelief, though, after the expensive learning materials reach their new home and school starts back up after Thanksgiving break.
McGee, who splits her time as a reading teacher between schools in her rural district, said that "a lot of times I would take books with me from other schools."
Now, with a nearly complete guided reading library at Pleasant View, she won't have to borrow in order to get her students proper reading materials.
McGee said that she had just been cleaning out a closet at the school, too, and was thinking about what to do with extra space that was available.
"It's just crazy how well things worked out," she said.
And so, she dropped into Boulder on her way back from picking her son up at the airport, walking into the Boulder library to the sight of Kidder and her family, waiting with a box full of books.
After they swapped stories, chatted about their respective schools and Kidder showed off some of the reading materials, with family members' help they began to load up McGee's car with Pleasant View Elementary's brand new library.
McGee said that it felt amazing to finally see the books and bring them home.
"Our kids are the same whether they're out here on this side of the mountains versus that side of the mountains. We have great kids, it sounds like, in both places," she said. "It's really a blessing."
And despite the schools being on different sides of the Continental Divide, through love of education, generosity and a little bit of leg-work, a new relationship was forged.
"I feel like we have a sister school now," Kidder said.
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