First, the donations FROM students. Above are Erika and Julia Guerette, posing with boxes of books explained in this official announcement about their achievement:

Want to read the classic West Side Story? Or last year’s hit Twilight? How about a John Grisham novel or one of the books from the children’s series Arthur? If so, you find these and 400 more books in five boxes headed to Alaska, thanks to the generosity of students and staff from Holy Names Academy and Our Lady of Guadalupe School. For the fourth year now, Julia (right in photo) and Erika Guerette (left) have been collecting books from schoolmates and sending them north to villages smaller than their schools. Many of the villages have a population of less than 200 people and are located in the remote parts of the state along the famed Iditarod Trail. Julia and Erika’s goal is simple. Books open doors that lead out of the rugged isolation kids their age face in the rural Alaskan villages where teen suicide is higher than the national average. Julia is a freshman at Holy Names Academy and Erika is an eighth grader at Our Lady of Guadalupe School. She’ll be joining her sister at Holy Names next year. The 2009 book drive put their running book count for the past four years close to 2,000 books.

Now, on to donations you can make for a local preschool – by buying books for yourself!

That’s a photo from last night’s story time at Barnes and Noble-Westwood Village, in honor of the Arbor Heights Co-op Preschool< BookFair, which continues one more day – buy anything through tomorrow at any B&N and mention this code: 497941.