Spotlight: Bess the Book Bus Provides Free Books for Disadvantaged Kids

This week, HISD’s Barrick and Grissom elementary schools welcomed a special guest. Bess the Book Bus visited these schools, as it has visited countless others, to bring free books for the students.

Access to books in the home is an important factor in fostering a love of reading, and studies have shown a correlation between books in the home and a child’s future education level and academic achievement. But for children of economically disadvantaged households – like much of the student body at Barrick and Grissom – books are often a luxury.

Bess the Book Bus is an organization which reaches out to economically disadvantaged children and provides them with free books, to encourage them to develop a love of reading and a strong foundation in literacy. With the help of corporate sponsors and individual private donors, Bess the Book Bus sends Volkswagen vans full of free books to children across the contiguous United States. The organization hopes to give away 100,000 books this year.

You can learn more about Bess the Book Bus’s mission, and about donation opportunities, here.