Mennonite Weekly Review

How is a school like an organ donor?

When it gives a part of itself to help another school thrive.

The metaphor comes from a former teacher at Chicago Mennonite Learning Center, which this summer delivered most of its library intact to a sister school, Hopi Mission School in Kykotsmovi Village, Ariz.

CMLC closed for a year in September 2008, but it soon became obvious to the CMLC board there was no choice but to make the closure permanent.

This spring, the board sponsored a sale of furniture and other items from the school. However, the library presented a special challenge.

“For a small school, we had a really good library,” said CMLC board chair Sueann VonGunten of Bristol, Ind. “It was such a useful thing, in total, that we didn’t want to just [give away or sell] a few books here and a few there.” The library was also Dewey Decimal System-coded and entered into a computer database.

Then someone had the idea to donate the library, almost in its entirety, along with the computer, to Hopi Mission School.

“Hopi Mission School, like some of the other [Mennonite Education Agency] schools such as ours and Philadelphia Mennonite High School, has less tuition support [for students] than some of the others,” VonGunten said. “We know how difficult it is to raise funds.”

The CMLC board was very supportive of sending the library to Hopi Mission School, she said. Volunteers from the Discovering Opportunities for Outreach and Reflection program in Chicago helped pack up the books — between 6,000 and 7,000 volumes, VonGunten said — and load them in a rented truck.

Richard Miller, a member of VonGunten’s congregation, Hively Avenue Mennonite Church in Elkhart, Ind., and a cousin to the Hopi Mission School principal at the time, Betty Handrich, offered to drive the truck to Arizona. And Marian Hostetler of Elkhart gave time this summer to help school staff begin to organize and shelve the books.