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Target stores set sights on helping Richey Elementary

Klint Lowry/SUNCOAST

Amanda Murray and Kenneth Estevez, employees of the SuperTarget in Odessa, add some greenery to the garden area at Richey Elementary School, in New Port Richey. Target employees gave books to the school and did landscape work.

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By KLINT LOWRY | The Suncoast News

Published: September 26, 2009

NEW PORT RICHEY - While Target stores are known for their bargains, a pair of the retail giant's West Pasco locations have given Richey Elementary School a 2-for-1 deal to remember.

Two stores on S.R. 54 - the Target at the intersection of Little Road in Trinity and the SuperTarget just west of the Suncoast Parkway in Odessa - each gave Richey Elementary $500 toward the purchase of books for the school's media center.

"The name of the event is 'Making Noise in the Library,' " said Jeremy Williams, a manager at the Target in Trinity. "The school goes online, chooses the books that they want. They get sent to the school then we come in and put our stamps on the stuff."

The event was made possible through a company community outreach program called Target Volunteers School Library Makeovers. The stores usually seek out Title I schools or others that presumably have more of a need for the reading materials, Williams explained.

On Sept. 18, a team of Target employees arrived at the school to break open 14 boxes of books. The timing of this gift was good, according to the school's media specialist, Jill Tracy, because the media center was running low on reading materials.

"We've been weeding through our collection," Tracy said. The School District encourages media specialists to remove books more than 10 years old from school library collections.

"Now we have these," Tracy said of the books from Target. "It's awesome."

"And they're all hardcovers," Tracy added, an important point when shopping for books that will mostly be held in young hands and carried around in backpacks.

In the "Make Noise in the Library" program, once a school is chosen, its staff can go online and choose from all the books in Target's inventory. Tracy and her colleagues almost hit the $500 spending limit on the nose.

"We got to, like, $499.70 because we kept going back and refiguring," Tracy said. "That's what we do with our own budget - we get every penny out of it that we can."

The Target team came bearing additional gifts, several bagsful of various school supplies to give away. When a Target does one of these, they like to make an event of it, Williams said. They'll read for the children, have a painting party, whatever the school wants.

For this occasion, while several of the employees were handling the gift-giving duties inside the media center, several others were just outside the media center.

Along with the school supplies, Target came bearing a wooden bench and matching planters, as well as several plants, and set about installing all of them.

"We wanted to make sure we didn't pick any plants that would draw bees or anything," said Mary-Ann Nevitt, a manager of the Suncoast Parkway Target.

The school has slowly been in the process of developing an outdoor reading area. Bruce and Monica Mills of marine construction firm Gulfside Docks donated money toward the purchase of some materials to furnish and decorate it, but the school still needed a bit more to get the area built.

The contribution doesn't finish the reading area, but it turns it from an empty slab of concrete into something functional. Thanks to Target, Terry said, the children now not only have something new to read, but a nice place to do it.

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