LOS ANGELES — In the fight to improve literacy, Elizabeth Dragga is looking to recruit as many students as possible.
She recently set up for an after-school event at Manual Arts High School with help from the school’s Book Club, hoping their excitement about books will be contagious.
“What I love so much about books is how they can let you go into their own worlds,” said tenth-grader Jazmine Garcia, who has loved to read as long as she can remember.
“You can start seeing what you like or what you enjoy. Maybe your interests will inspire you to do something, make your own book,” she said.
Dragga started the Book Truck in 2011.
While working at Children’s Book World in West Los Angeles, she made an interesting discovery.
“All of the books for elementary school kids were flying off the shelves and all of the books for teenagers were being left behind,” Dragga said.
She said there are lots of literacy programs geared toward elementary school kids, but there’s a big gap when it comes to teens.
“There was so much cool, exciting stuff happening in young adult literature, and I just thought it was such a shame that these books weren’t getting to the kids and so I just started taking them in my car. I would drive them to some of the foster youth group homes I had worked with as an advocate,” Dragga said.
During the last school year, the Book Truck worked with 4,000 students throughout Los Angeles County and gave away nearly 7,000 books. Dragga said those numbers have been slowly climbing every year.
“Thankfully, we were able to still get books into the community during COVID but we didn’t have that interactive piece with the kids and so it’s been so nice since the spring of last year to start getting back in and really getting to talk to the kids,” she said.
The school’s librarian said Manual Arts is in a book desert without a bookstore for miles.
“The students really don’t have access to a lot of good reading material and even with the public libraries, a lot of them are not going,” said Manual Arts Librarian Kelly Flores.
And studies show teens with low literacy are more likely to become pregnant, drop out of school and be unable to find a job.
“I think there’s something about a tangible, physical book you can take with you, that you don’t have to plug in. A lot of the kids we work with, too, come from a transient population, so there're no strings attached,” Dragga said. “Every time we do an event we are mobbed — mobbed by kids. There’s a huge crowd. They’re just really excited to get their hands on books.”
She splits the books into 10 different categories, and each student chooses up to two books for free.
Among the most popular, dark thriller and dystopia. Dragga relies on donations to buy books, but also works with companies to do book drives and talks to publishers.
“We have kids that are talking with us that say I’ve never read a book outside, outside of school before, or I’ve never picked out a book on my own. I’ve never read a book that I liked,” she said.
Overall, it’s a chance to spark imaginations and in her book, that’s well worth the effort.
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