Portland Public Schools received a $25,000 grant from The Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation to purchase books for its middle school libraries.

The grant will allow the district’s three middle schools, Lyman Moore, King, and Lincoln, to buy 400 books each.

The district says the books will benefit students who are English language learners while also expanding the libraries’ collection of books that represents diverse cultural experiences.

“We will be able to build three sections of diverse lower reading level/high interest books in each middle school library,” Moore’s multilingual educator Meredith Doyle said. “This will finally enable all of our ESOL [English for Speakers of Other Languages] newcomers to ‘shop’ and browse for books like all of the other students. I have been dreaming and asking for this for almost ten years and now it is about to become reality.” 

One-third of Portland Public Schools; 6,000 students are English language learners.