Katey Walls and Gage Lind pose with Leesburg Elementary students and their new books.

LEESBURG — Recently Katey Walls and Gage Lind, students from Warsaw Community High School, underwent a project with Leesburg Elementary School in order to provide books to some of the classrooms and students at the school, along with doing presentations that illustrate why reading is important at a young age.

Walls and Lind both decided to do this as a part of their yearly Family Career and Community Leaders of America project. For these projects, they go out into the community and find real-world topics. For these two high schoolers, reading was the topic they chose.

“Basically, we feel that as children grow up, reading is not enforced as it should be, and no matter what you do in the future, reading will always be a skill you need to know,” explained Walls.

Throughout the months of December and January, the high school students collected children’s books locally from the community. After the donation was over, they counted and sorted the books to get them ready for distribution to the students at Leesburg. Overall, they were able to collect 520 books in the two-month period.

“We feel that in order to really enforce reading and why it is important, having the resources to do so is just as helpful,” said Lind. “So, by getting the community together to donate books to the children not only helps them in the material aspect, but helps them know that everybody around them supports reading as much as we do.”

In February, both Walls and Lind got the chance to make a change by going to Leesburg to directly talk to the kids, and participate in reading activities that showed the students the fun side of reading and writing.

“Our main point was to give back to the students at Leesburg, by having fun and explaining the impacts of reading. We believe that reading is not only a skill that will be used in school, but will be used beyond that, and throughout your whole life.” said Walls.

Walls and Lind participated in the Indiana FCCLA state leadership conference in Muncie on March 9, where they presented their results from this project. The two received a gold award in their category – Focus on Children.

“It was a fantastic learning experience and we can’t wait to do another project next year,” said Walls.