Happy Endings Become New Beginnings

On Wednesday, Rachel Fryatt turned 18.

But the senior at Central Bucks East High School wasn’t focused on getting presents; she was giving them.

Rachel took a trip into Philadelphia Wednesday to help deliver 8,000 books she and five other CB East students collected under the auspices of CB Cares, the community group that supports positive character development in Central Bucks schools.

The trip was the culmination of a book drive that began on Martin Luther King Day. Its beneficiary ended up being a school in desperate need.

“We thought it would be a good idea to do a book drive, and then we heard about a charter school that burned down in Philly,” Fryatt said Wednesday. “We thought, ‘How great would it be if kids were helping kids in this situation?’”

The Global Leadership Academy, a charter school in west Philadelphia, caught fire in January.

"Everything was lost in the fire," the school’s CEO Naomi Booker was quoted as saying in The Inquirer then. "There is not a pencil, not a book, not a crayon.”

CB Cares director Kimberly Cambra saw the news coverage of the fire. She already was at work planning service projects that her group would sponsor on Martin Luther King Day. A book drive to restore the devastated school’s library seemed like a perfect fit, Cambra said.

Rachel, who lives in Buckingham, arranged for drop boxes to be placed at eight of the district’s elementary schools. Each week, the young students would fill the boxes with books they had outgrown or no longer wanted.

Then, each week, Rachel and five other CB East students - Kendall Kirsteier, Ty Kooser, Kelly Lapp, Joey Sculley and Connor Wright - would go collect the books.

By the time the book drive ended in April, the team had collected nearly 10,000 books, Cambra said.

The students, who are all now seniors at CB East, sorted the books a little each week this summer, Fryatt said.

From the initial mountain of donations, the students culled about 8,000 appropriate for kindergarten through eighth grades.

Cambra stored the books in an empty office until the Philadelphia school moved into its new building at 46th and Girard and could accept the books.

They were delivered to the Global Leadership Academy on Wednesday in a cargo van volunteered for the purpose by Fred Beans car dealerships.

Cambra said Wednesday evening that the books made a huge difference to the more than 500 students at the charter school.

"I really wish I could have brought people from our community to Philadelphia with me, because they could have seen that we are changing lives one page at a time," Cambra said.

Once she had seen the school and met the students and Booker and her educators, Cambra decided on the spot that the book donation would not be a one-time event. It would be the first step in a relationship between CB Cares and the charter school.

"They knew when we left that we weren’t leaving," Cambra said. "This wasn’t about making us feel good. This was living the 40 assets, getting kids involved to help other kids."

In addition to those books, another 2,000 books for babies, toddlers and preschoolers will be donated to Child, Home and Community. The Doylestown-based group works with pregnant teens to ensure healthy births, enhance family stability and promote self-sufficiency.

The offer of the donated books, which are expected to arrive at the group’s offices on West Street in October, were a welcome surprise, director Beth Styer said Wednesday.

“We work with teen moms and dads throughout Bucks County, and we talk to them about the importance of reading to their child every day,” Styer said. “Many of them may not have grown up with a lot of books in the house and may not have a lot of books themselves.

“We talk about the different nurturing routines that we can encourage, and one of them is reading to your children. So it’s just wonderful to have books to give out to our young moms and dads so they can start to build up libraries for their children.”

As for Fryatt, who is in the process of applying to colleges, she said she learned a valuable lesson.

“It didn’t take that much time and effort, because so many people helped,” said Fryatt, who wants to study audiology and speech pathology. “I hope what I did inspires other kids to feel like they can make a difference, too.”