College Mentors collecting textbooks for kids

Even though a new semester has begun, many students are still left with the ghost of semesters past in the form of textbooks they cannot sell back.

Junior Katie Smith is hoping students might help her put those books to good use.

Smith is organizing a textbook drive to help raise money for the group College Mentors for Kids, a nonprofit organization that gives children, typically from grades one through four, the opportunity to experience how higher education can influence their lives.

Each week, children from local schools are bused to campus to spend time with their mentors, who engage them in activities they hope will build their desire to learn and help others around them.

But with the cost of helping these kids reaching more than $11,000 a year, Smith said she hopes the textbook drive will help to alleviate some of these costs.

“It’s very expensive to bus the kids to campus every week, but it’s really important to give them a consistent, and consistently free, after school activity,” Smith said. “Being on the IU campus is a very important part of the College Mentors experience, but it also costs a lot of money to get the kids here.”

Although the drive started at the end of the fall semester, the program has already had some early success.

“We’ve actually only collected about 30 books, but we’ve made about $500,” Smith said. “It’s incredible.”

When the program receives donated books, it sells them online and uses the profits to benefit the children the program works with. In addition to those profits, the program also accepts donations to the cause.

Mentors, including freshman Anna Taylor, donated much of this money.

“I walked up and down my floor asking people to donate,” Taylor said. “A lot of them donated a couple of books, and I think we raised about $225 doing that.”

Taylor, like the other mentors, said she believes College Mentors plays an important part in educating and enriching these kids’ lives, and she said she hopes the money raised from the drive will help the mentors continue to teach.

“Usually there’s something revolving around community service,” which is one of the group’s core goals, Taylor said. “There’s some sort of educational portion, and then there’s a fun activity like making a mask.”

While Smith realizes most students tend to sell their books back at the end of the semester, she also knows many books can’t be sold. She said she hopes students might be willing to donate these to a good cause. Most of the children in the program have parents who weren’t able to attend college, so they can’t receive the same experience at home, Smith said.

A lot of students, such as freshman Arielle Simmons, try to sell back their books at the end of the semester because of a need for money. Without that extra cash, it can be difficult for them to buy the new books they need.

“All of my books were sold back at the end of last semester,” Simmons said. “I probably would donate if I could.”

Smith understands this problem, having sold plenty of books back in the past as well.

“If during the year people want to donate old books or books they couldn’t sell back or books from classes they dropped, we could use them,” Smith said.