Program Delivers 24,000 Books to Alexandria City Public Schools

Duffy Books in Homes USA presented 24,000 hardback books worth about $120,000 to Alexandria City Public Schools during a Friday morning ceremony at Jefferson-Houston School in Alexandria.

"You can't make it far unless you're a great leader...and this morning is a first step," said ACPS Superintendent Morton Sherman at the event.

The books will be distributed among all ACPS schools, which can choose to distribute them to students or use them in classrooms and libraries. 

Mayor Bill Euille said he's a huge supporter of promoting language and reading and joked that "we may turn this truck into a classroom or a museum," referring to the 18-wheeler full of books and parked on the sidewalk in front of the school.

"Kids and parents, you must read, read, read," he said.

Some of the books will be donated to a new T.C. Williams High School Carson Reading Room, created through a partnership with The Ben Carson Reading Project as a place where students can develop their reading skills.

The reading project also offers scholarships for fourth through 11th graders.

Alexandria School Board member Helen Morris spoke at the event thanking the Duffy Books in Homes program for the books. She noted that books have a special poignancy for her as her mother was a librarian and in a house with nine kids and a tight budget, "she always had walls of books and a library card."

At Friday’s ceremony, a Mainfreight USA tractor-trailer carrying the cargo of books arrived at Jefferson-Houston, where Richard Quest, president of Duffy Books in Homes, presented a banner to ACPS Superintendent Morton Sherman.

"We must break the cycle of booklessness," Quest said.

The program was founded in New Zealand and the country's ambassador to the United States, Michael Moore, was also in attendance. Moore is a huge advocate of literacy and noted that in New Zealand, which has a population of 4.5 million, the program has given away 9 million books.

The books will continue on to the ACPS warehouse for sorting. Volunteers from the NAACP, the Superintendent’s Advisory Committees on African-American and Latino Student Achievement, Wright to Read, the Alexandria Tutoring consortium and others also participated in the event and the sorting.