Book Buggy brings books to the community

Panther Valley School District and Bennett Toyota launched the Book Buggy to bring free books into the community throughout the summer and school year. This project was facilitated in collaboration with Nicole Pollinger from United Way CarbonCorp. Each week in the summer, the Book Buggy will travel throughout the district giving out free books to anyone in the community. Students will be able to choose from a variety of books and either keep them or return them. The mobile library will also be at football games and local community events during the year.

In an WNEP article, Panther Valley Elementary Principal Robert Palazzo said of the project, “I think with the COVID closure, the Panther Valley Library was closed for a long period of time, so there wasn’t a place for families to get books. They are open again, so we do encourage families to support the local library as well, but I think that this is a real opportune time.”

Palazzo also mentioned the importance of literacy as motivation for the Book Buggy initiative: “Research shows that a literacy-rich environment is one of the biggest indicators of success for students, so the more books kids have in a home, the more likely they are to be successful.”