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A Decade of Donations: Education Department Holds Annual Book Drive for Bethlehem School
A decade long DeSales tradition helped to kick off the holiday season for kids in Bethlehem.
The department of education recently wrapped up its 10th annual book drive for Marvine Elementary School. Every fall, students in EE-111 Infant and Youth Development organize the drive and collect some 600 books. This year, the department donated its 6,000th book.
Katrin Blamey, Ph.D., education department chair and director of M.Ed. programs, recently accompanied a group of nearly 20 students from her EE-310 Language and Literacy class to Marvine Elementary to meet the children and read to them.
“We walked into the third-grade classroom, and we were greeted with a bunch of smiling faces,” says Kasie Bloss ’25, an early childhood education major who helped to organize the drive and tagged along to Marvine with Blamey’s class. “They were so excited for us to be there.”
The DeSales students each read a book to the class, ran a literacy activity with the younger students, and then signed the donated books. The third graders were able to select two books to take home.
“The main purpose of this drive is to get books into children’s hands,” Bloss says. “The more they read, the more they’re learning. The drive is a lot of work but with such great results. It’s a wonderful thing, and I’m very glad I got to be a part of it.”
