If someone had told me three months ago that the hundreds of thousands of books I saw sitting unused and going to waste in the basement of Philadelphia School District headquarters would by now be almost fully catalogued, ready to be shipped to the kids who need them, I probably wouldn't have believed it. I might have even laughed.
The task at hand seemed simple enough: There were a lot of unused books and a lot of kids who need books. Sort the books and give the kids any they could use. But in a drowning district, nothing's simple.
The fact that the books had piled up in the first place didn't inspire confidence. It would require a commonsense solution that cut through the bureaucracy.
The football field's worth of books had been collecting in the basement for a decade - a graveyard built from shuttered schools, poor past decisions, and bad leadership, and symbolic of the challenges facing a district slashed so close to the bone that even taking stock of its own resources seemed overwhelming.
Daniel Luzer is GOVERNING's news editor.
