Despite falling short during fundraising — businesses again just aren’t able to give this year as they have in prior years — the Plant a Book, Grow a Child program was able to place 439 books into the hands of 282 local elementary school students last week during the Scholastic Book Fair. To pull it off, the Estes Valley Sunrise Rotary Club, which currently runs the program, and Bank of Estes Park agreed to simply split the difference of the budget shortfall, and both wrote big checks to ensure that the program was fully funded for one more year. The program gives each elementary school teacher and the librarian $200 to provide books to the students who can benefit most from them.
Scott and Brandi Applegate started this program in 2016, and since then it has given out an unbelievable 5,314 books to 2,491 local children, at a total cost of $38,600. Jen Maley, the elementary school librarian, coordinates and runs the program at the school, ensuring that everything goes as it should every year. Any expenses from the program from day one until now have been paid by the Applegates, so donors have always been able to rest assured that every penny of every dollar donated has gone toward books for kids!
This is the second year of a major shortfall in funding that came down to the last minute, so the future of the program is in question. The Applegates plan to approach Estes Valley Sunrise Rotary Club, which currently warehouses the program, and a few other local nonprofits (EP Education Foundation? Bright Christmas?) to see if any of them would like to take the program and run it in-house as a budget expense line of approximately $5,000, since it is no longer able to fund itself. If not, this may have been Plant a Book, Grow a Child’s last year…