SPARKS — This week, 17 Washoe County schools, including Sparks’ Greenbrae, Lena Juniper and Lincoln Park elementary schools, will be the beneficiaries of 6,500 reading books provided by the Molina Foundation and funded by the Assistance League of Reno-Sparks. To encourage children to read, the schools that qualify for but aren’t receiving Title I funding will each receive about 350 books that have been awarded the Caldecott or Newbery medal.

“With the focus on having kids be able to read through No Child Left Behind, a lot of those kids don’t have as much access to many books,” said Coleen DeLong, partnership and marketing coordinator for Washoe County’s Education Alliance.

DeLong said the effort will help low-income students become excited about reading in schools that may not be able to provide a number of reading materials.

“They’re definitely at-risk schools in lower-income socioeconomic situations and don’t have access to federal funds to help and supplement what they’re doing in the schools,” DeLong said.

Through a project started in 2002 called Links to Learning, the Assistance League of Reno provides about $20,000 in grant money to Washoe County schools, a total that has remained fairly static for the last three years, according to Brenda Nenzel, the league’s vice president of philanthropic programs. Links to Learning is meant to motivate teachers to fund classroom projects.

Currently, the same 17 schools that will receive these books next week also were served by the league last year because economic conditions haven’t changed, Nenzel said. About 194 classroom projects received Links to Learning grant money.

“(These schools) don’t have the income base to do things like PTA fundraisers or for school programs,” she said. “They can’t be funded through tax dollars. That’s why they’re eligible to us. … These schools kind of fall through the cracks.”

Teachers must apply for grants with the Assistance League and can receive up to $500 each, or they may collaborate with two or three other teachers on a project and can get up to $1,500, but whatever they do they must show they will use the money in creative ways for their students. The applications are flexible, Nenzel said, and can be used to bring in mountaineers to give kids a living history of surviving life in Nevada and for science lessons. Some teachers have used the funding for pizza nights with children’s parents as an incentive to show them how to help their kids.

“We’ve just had a real smorgasbord,” Nenzel said.

The books are provided by the Molina Foundation in Southern California through one of its programs called “Books for Buddies.” Nenzel said the foundation’s purpose is to reduce disparities in health care and education among low-income and underserved populations.

Having received its shipment, the Assistance League received help on Friday from the Charmanta Auxiliary, volunteers of the Assistance League, to package and label boxes of books at the Education Alliance Teacher’s Warehouse in Reno.

Exactly what will be done with the books will be left to each principal’s discretion, Nenzel added.

“Some of them are sets of books,” she said. “There are a whole lot of sports bios and science groupings that would appropriate to a class project because there are several editions. Some might want to do it through the library where all students can have access to the books.”

Some titles include the Chronicles of Narnia books, “Pirates of the Caribbean” and the “That’s Our Nurse” or “That’s Our Principal” series.

The idea is to foster reading skills among students.