The Morongo Unified School District recently announced the installation of book vending machines in every school across the district, a significant step forward in promoting literacy and fostering a love for reading among students.
As the first district in the state to implement this program district-wide, MUSD’s book vending machines were officially installed this week with a special ribbon-cutting ceremony. Each machine is carefully curated to include a mix of genres, authors and reading levels, ensuring that every student can find something that piques their interest.
Operating similarly to traditional snack and drink vending machines, students will receive tokens for the machines as rewards for positive behavior, academic achievements, or through logged reading time in Beanstack or with the public library, making book selection a special and memorable experience.
District librarian Kat Royer said, “These machines bring the thrill of the book fair, the adventure of a new bookstore and the excitement of the library to our students and staff with no cost to the students or parents.” Royer learned about the vending machines last year at the California School Library Association’s annual conference and worked over several months with Superior Text, the company that supplied the book vending machines, to get them into our schools.
Owner of Superior Text Diane Goldsmith said, “The Morongo Basin is book desert and for young people here, it’s very hard to access books that they are interested in reading. As a librarian you can’t always keep up with what’s current and what’s interesting for your students but with a book vending machine the options are always changing, and we can always add in new books to make them accessible for our students.”
Goldsmith visited the Morongo Basin to celebrate the launch of the vending machines and she said that her team curated all of their book selections specifically for pleasure reading for students. The high school vending machines include dystopian novels, manga series and even some learn to draw books to provide some options for reluctant readers.
Goldsmith added, “These aren’t schoolbooks; these are books specifically for pleasure reading.”
