SIMI SCHOOL BOOKS GET A NEW SHELF LIFE.

Byline: Sonia Giordani Daily News Staff Writer

Sifting through hundreds of classic readers and children's picture books packed in dusty boxes, teacher Nancy Wold hoped to help fill the empty bookshelves of the new library at White Oak Elementary School on Saturday.

The book collection has been stashed away in various classrooms around campus and in a temporary storage bin ever since state-mandated class-size reductions forced the school to convert its library facility into a classroom for Wold's second-grade class last year.

``The kids need a place where they can explore the subjects that interest them independently,'' Wold said. ``A school library is so important because we need to foster a love of reading in the children outside the classroom.''

Parents and teachers gathered at the storage bin Saturday morning and celebrated the national Make A Difference Day by hauling the dozens of boxes of books into the former faculty room, which will now serve as the new school library.

Members of White Oak's PTA decided in recent months to make the school library a priority this year.

``We wanted to get it back up and going and to make sure it offers something to spark the reading bug in the kids,'' said Barbara Leighty, co-chairwoman of the PTA's library committee.

Leighty said the group decided to invite parents and teachers to kick off the effort Saturday, when volunteers across the country celebrated Make A Difference Day by contributing their time and energy in their local communities.

The goal of Saturday's efforts was to get all the books in the temporary storage bin into the library and to begin sorting the fiction from the nonfiction.

And while most of the fiction books will be shelved rather quickly in the coming weeks, parents and teachers plan to spend more time with the nonfiction books, many of which date back to the 1960s and some as far back as the 1940s.

``This project has forced us to look at what was in our library. Many of the books just don't meet our current standards,'' said Linda Pierce, president of the PTA and mother of two children at White Oak Elementary School.

``First, we want to make sure the books are exciting and that reading becomes exciting to our kids,'' she said. ``Second, we want to put these books back into the hands of the children.''

With a box of books in her lap, Chris Quinn sorted through the authors and alphabetized works of fiction on a book shelf.

``I love books and my two daughters love books,'' said Quinn, a Simi Valley mother of a second-grader and a sixth-grader at White Oak Elementary.

Quinn said that she volunteered as a parent librarian when the library was open two years ago.

``I am really glad that the library will be back,'' she said. ``We have local public libraries, but a library on the school campus is really much more accessible to a lot of the kids.''

Ben Barile and his 9-year-old son, Tim, turned out Saturday morning after Tim's early-morning soccer game.

``I think this new library will be great. I think it's overdue,'' said Barile, who with his son assembled one of five new bookcases donated to the school from the PTA of Simi Valley Unified's Valley View Junior High School.

``I'm so excited. I really love to read,'' said Tim Barile, a fourth-grader who said he loved fiction and sports books.

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

PHOTO (1--color--ran in Simi edition only) Volunteers start to unload books from a storage trailer for the new school library.

(2) Chris Quinn, left, and Dawn Rosenthal organize books Saturday for the new library at White Oak Elementary School in Simi Valley.

(3) Leslie Friedman, left, Susan Dugan and Linda Pierce assemble book shelves for hundreds of volumes that have found a new home.

Gene Blevins/Special to the Daily News