A year at José Ángel Ulloa Elementary School

A little over a year ago, we installed a library at José Ángel Ulloa Elementary School in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, with the support of amazing volunteers representing Michigan Rotary groups. This school was special, not only because it was the first library installed in 2025, but also because it holds over 60 books dedicated to loved ones through our Holiday Book Dedications!

Your Impact: 
In bringing this library to life as donors, volunteers, and supporters, you created equitable access to books in a book desert, planted the seeds of learning and empathy, laid pathways to imagination and creativity, and built the foundations for critical thinking and problem solving. You redefined education for the 355 kids and 20 teachers at this school.

We at Chispa Project know that books change the story, but here’s how we see that in action.  In your library’s first year:

• teachers and their classes averaged 1 weekly library visit, 

• and holistically, students went from not reading for pleasure at all to reading for at least 20 minutes weekly. 

While our goal is 45 minutes per student per week, this is exactly why our model includes 2 years of support: building a lasting culture of reading takes time, strategy, and accountability, and we are still walking alongside this school to bring that vision to life. We’ll continue supporting this community through another school year to help them develop the habit of reading 45 minutes a week (or more)!

Our end of year survey of the educational community adds to this story. It showed that 100% of teachers agree or strongly agree that their students are now more independent, fluid readers, with better comprehension and vocabulary than they’d ever seen prior to having a library. They also agree that the library has improved the overall quality of education at the school and the pride they feel in their institution. This sentiment is mirrored in over 94% of parents, who also unanimously agree that this library has had a strong, positive impact on their school community. 

But really, who better to describe the impact than the community itself. Here’s a short video from the teachers and students at  José Ángel Ulloa Elementary School.

Here’s a gallery of memories from this last year at José Ángel Ulloa Elementary School. And, here’s to many more memories that are sure to happen during the 2026 school year!