High School Book Fairs: Seriously?

Why don’t high schools have book fairs? We’re too busy. Book fairs are for elementary school. We don’t have room. Who wants to bother? I’m sure you can relate to thoughts like these.

Coming into a high school library after spending one year as an elementary school librarian, I was eager to see if we could make a book fair work. The elementary school where I had spent my first year as a librarian profited thousands of dollars for their budget. Surely we could get a little piece of that action!

I chose to work with Scholastic for our first book fair because they were the vendor we had used at the elementary level, and I was familiar with their representative as well as their product lines.

HOW WE DID IT

I contacted Scholastic to talk about the possibility of doing a high school book fair. Was this something they even did? They were definitely willing. We scheduled a fair for December, one week before winter break. We scheduled what they call a middle school fair, so that we would get their higher reading level books. I also talked with the representative about personalizing our fair by adding picture books and as many adult titles as were available. Right before the holidays we were targeting our faculty and staff for gift-giving as much as we were targeting student interest.

Instead of planning to close the library down for the week of the fair, like we did in elementary school, we cordoned off a corner of the library and set up the fair with only one entrance area in order to control traffic. We scheduled retirees to come in and work the fair for us so that we would still be available to classes and individuals who needed our help in the library. We used two people at a time, so one could work the register and the other could wander to help individuals make choices and to keep eyes open against theft. At the end of each day, we locked the register drawer in our office and used large garbage bags to cover the tables that held small non-book items like erasers and pencil sharpeners.

We advertised using the posters and flyers that came from Scholastic. We emailed teachers asking them to bring their classes down for a few minutes at the beginning of the week, and we advertised on the school website.

WERE WE SUCCESSFUL?

Heck, yeah! The kids were super excited, remembering book fairs from elementary school and telling us about Clifford erasers they had purchased when they were little. (We called Scholastic to see about getting Clifford erasers, but they were not a current product.) They bought books and lots of goofy pens and erasers. We ended up with a profit of just over $600, and had a ton of fun doing it! We were also able to purchase books from the fair at half off—a great deal!

THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING

As part of the Scholastic book fair, they send a container with a slotted top to set out for kids to donate change for purchasing more books. We only collected a few dollars in change during the fair, but we keep the container out on the library desk next to our printer (printing at our school is free) for the rest of the school year. Each year, we collect around fifty dollars in change donations from kids who don’t like to carry change!

THE LAST WORD

With budget cuts in recent years, everyone is trying to make a dollar go further. This was one week of the school year where we typically don’t teach the number of classes we do during other times. The book fair brings in students and staff who don’t typically spend a lot of time in the library. With the profit we made, this was a win-win for everyone. Now choose a vendor, give them a call, and start a new tradition in your library!