Las Vegas business group, charity to donate $6.8 million in textbooks

It's a gift to dwarf all gifts.

Two local groups, a business organization and a charity, will on Friday announce the largest in-kind donation ever made to the Public Education Foundation, a nonprofit that coordinates philanthropic aid to the Clark County School District.

The Latin Chamber of Commerce and Another Joy Foundation plan to give $6.8 million worth of textbooks to the Public Education Foundation, which will then work with the school district to determine where the books are needed.

Judi Steele, president of the education foundation, said the charity has received $500,000 or $1 million in in-kind donations, including artwork and personal computers, but never anything approaching the size of this latest contribution.

But more importantly, the gift "represents a partnership with a lot of different organizations," Steele said. "It represents a strategic alliance that includes a lot of people who care about the community."

The groups will formally announce the donation at the Latin Chamber of Commerce's Feb Joy has delivered medicines, medical supplies and education materials across the world, but the nonprofit's executives saw need in their own back yard. They reached out to the Latin Chamber to discuss giving, and Javier Trujillo, the group's chairman and a former Clark County School District teacher, connected the group with the Public Education Foundation.

Textbook aid immediately made sense. With Southern Nevada struggling to recover from recession, local families could use help coming up with books, said Another Joy founder Alden Crowley. Plus, education budget cuts -- in particular, "dramatic" reductions in textbook dollars -- made the need for help with books all the more acute, Trujillo said.

Big textbook publishers including McGraw-Hill and Pearson sealed the deal by offering huge surpluses of unused books from 2006 or later.

Those books, all 122,600 of them, will start making their way into classrooms in at least 25 local schools in the next month. The texts, many of them for bilingual students, will cover areas such as math, science and language arts in all grades. Some of them will go to under-booked high school libraries; others are college texts that will go to university-bound students to give them a head start on advanced course work.

Both groups say Friday's donation is just the beginning.

They expect to rustle up at least another $15 million or so of books, for a total of more than $20 million in texts to local schools, in the next 12 to 18 months.

"When you bring organizations together, there are synergies that happen naturally," Trujillo said. "You start to realize you can do so much more than you can do on your own."

Contact reporter Jennifer Robison at jrobison@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4512.