Thank you Hewes Highlanders for your wonderful donation of 235 books — which included books in every category that we need from board books and picture books to beginning readers and chapter books to nonfiction, graphic novels, novels for teens, poetry, and Spanish language books. A special shout out to Mrs Turner’s class for collecting the most books and winning the donut party!

It is worth noting that this is the FIRST book drive we’ve had in the seven years we’ve been doing this that the number of books that we count (and re-count) on our end is HIGHER than the number of books we were told by the group! Also, we only had to exclude ONE book that was clearly used, BY FAR the fewest % of used books we’ve received in a school donation. ASB, you must have done an awesome job communicating in your class presentations the importance of new books only!

THANK YOU Hewes Leadership class for organizing this effort, Mr. Jennings for rallying your class behind our cause and all your work behind the scenes, and the Hewes Community for helping ECBC to provide books and reading for Orange County’s hospitalized kids!