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CITY AND LOCAL EDUCATOR WORKING TO CLEAR DISCARDED BOOKS

By Erin France/OF THE COMMERCIAL STAFF
Wednesday, June 3, 2009 8:50 AM CDT

There’s a mountain of molding books outside the Wanda Bateman Youth Center.

An estimated 300,000 discarded, molding books rot outside the Wanda Bateman Youth Center. The huge pile of mostly textbooks were described by their owner as too old for classroom use. Pine Bluff Commercial/Ralph Fitzgerald

Everyone agrees that the books need to be moved soon, and city officials and owner Dr. Robert Anderson say they are working together to create a plan to fit the task.

“We want to try to work with him and come up with a way to help them get those books removed,” said Pine Bluff Police Department Deputy Chief Ivan Whitfield.

The books outside the center are mostly textbooks detailing science, history, literature and other subjects for different grade levels.

From a brief overview most also seem to be old, with publication dates in the 1990s.

Anything past 2000 is too old for the classroom, according to school district guidelines, Anderson said.

“Those particular books that you saw were put there to discard,” he said. “They cannot be used in any classroom.”

Anderson, an employee of the Arkansas River Education Service Cooperative said the loss of the estimated 300,000 copies is not a retail loss because there is no money in the project.

“Those are my books. They don’t belong to anybody but me,” he said. “I am not taking any loss on those books.”

How exactly the books came to Pine Bluff is still something of a mystery that Anderson will not share.

“We have a private donor,” he said. “I travel across the country to various book places and those books are donated to me.”

The books have been the unfortunate victims of not enough time or space, said Kevin Collins, a member of the center’s board of directors as well as the overseer of the center.

“The other books you don’t see are already donated to a certain place or area,” he said.

About 75 percent of books in the storage place found a new home while the other 25 percent needed another place to stay, Collins said.

Anderson said he had about two weeks’ time starting in mid to late April to move his books from their former storage location near the Wanda Bateman Youth Center.

So the center’s board allowed Anderson to store the extra books outside the center, Collins said.

“It was a board decision,” he said. “It was moved to that specific location because he’s actually helping the Wanda Bateman Youth Center.”

Anderson said storing books outside is not his regular manner of getting rid of out-dated books, but was necessary this time because of the volume.

He said another business was moving into the building, and the owner informed him he needed to vacate.

He said the first day that the books were out by the center, it started raining.

“That weekend — it rained all weekend,” he said.

Protecting the books was on the agenda, he said, but before a protective covering could be positioned, it had already started raining.

And since then, Anderson said he has cleaned up what he can when he can in increments, which he said cost a couple hundred dollars a load.

“I just paid for a load to be dumped,” he said. “I will pay for it — I am paying for it.”

The job is so large, though, he added, that it’s impossible for him to clean up the entire pile in just a few weeks.

Fourth Ward Alderman George Stepps, also a center board member, said he has asked that the books be removed.

“From my understanding, the books were brought there because they needed some storage,” he said. “They had more books than they had storage space.”

Stepps said he had not received any complaints from the community.

“I guess I was the biggest complainer,” he said. “They need to get it cleaned up immediately.”

Normally, Anderson said the books are stored until they can be dumped by Waste Management.

Many of those books are stored at the Arkansas River Education Service Cooperative.

Back at the cooperative, Anderson can open doors that would make any bibliophile drool with stacks of books mounting towards the ceiling in room after room.

Anderson holds a few different titles at the cooperative. He’s a parental involvement and community specialist, as well as the director of the Family Resource Center for the cooperative and the director of the Arkansas Delta Resource Center.

He also is a pastor at the Mulberry Grove Baptist Church and lives in Altheimer.

Growing up in Nashville, Tenn., Anderson said his parents operated a farm and stressed learning, reading and working.

Taking an intelligence test landed the 14-year-old Anderson in college.

“As I was reading, black folks were not allowed to read or write,” he said.

He said he started collecting books, a kind of library that he could share with others.

With his wife, Youvarn Howard Anderson, he said the couple started reaching out to children with books in 1997.

Although his wife died in 1998, Anderson said he has continued working on her dream.

“Her passion was to help disadvantaged children,” he said.

His work now revolves around curriculum, and matching schools with appropriate books they can use for free, he said.

“We have become the bookmark of the Delta.”

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