About 420 kids go to school there. This is not a slice of 1950s America, it's 21st century California. Yolo County ranks third in the state in the percentage of residents living below poverty level. The students at Dingle speak Spanish, Urdu and other East Indian languages with more than 30 percent speaking limited English. More than 60 percent of the students receive a free or reduced-cost lunch.
Many students live in poverty with accompanying language and cultural barriers.
Not the ingredients that ensure great academic achievement. And most of Dingle's students are not achieving at grade level although improvements have been made recently. The school's focus remains almost exclusively on raising academic levels. Improving the content of and access to the library will surely help and may even provide some joy to students who find themselves, perhaps with a little prodding, late-blooming readers. Last year, a librarian began to remove outdated books from the library's shelves but had to stop because the purge would have left the library with too few books.