By Brittany Burke

The Southeastern Barnes & Noble Bookstore is beginning the annual Literacy Angel Tree Book Drive Project.

The SE bookstore intends to gather enough donations through the project to provide at least one to two new books to each child attending the Big Five SOSU Head Start program.

Donations are needed by Dec. 17 and can be dropped off at the SE bookstore.

To meet the goal of 50 books, the SE bookstore will be accepting new and gently used preschool level books and monetary donations. The SE bookstore will donate gently used books directly to the Big Five SOSU Head Start program to expand their internal library and use the monetary donations to buy children’s books from the SE bookstore at a discounted rate.

Bookstore Manager Jackie Codner said, “The point of the program is for the kids… all out of kindness and to help anyway we can.”

The Literacy Angel Tree project has been going on for at least six years and the idea was spurred from previous bookstore manager because of her concerns about the state literacy rates, said Codner. The purpose of the project is to target younger children to get them interested in reading and to help them develop vocabulary before they step foot into school, said Codner.

According to the Center For Educational Freedom, 43 percent of Oklahoma’s adult population reads at a seventh grade level or lower.