MIDDLETOWN — It may have been a little cold when the Appoquinimink bookmobile came to neighborhoods in the MOT area in early February, but that certainly didn’t damper the excitement of the nearly 500 students who showed up for free books.

“We were very excited when we started. We saw one car, two cars and … all of a sudden we had tables where we’re spreading people out,” said Tammy DeCapua, librarian for Old State Elementary School. “We were just as excited as the kids were.”

The bookmobile is 17 years old, something that Jodie Klein at Silver Lake Elementary inherited 15 years ago. In the summertime, the bookmobile — which was once a van and now consists of the librarians’ own cars — goes from neighborhood to neighborhood in the Middletown area to hand out free books.

Earlier in the year, the libraries began offering curbside pickup so students could request books and then come by the schools for contactless pickup. Since the pandemic hit, though, they’ve been trying to figure out how to extend the program into the typical year, Ms. Klein said.

Last week, the bookmobile made its first trek during the academic year. Three crews covered three areas and served 489 students. The crews handed out books north of Middletown, in the area of Olive B. Loss, Lorewood Grove and Cedar Lane elementary schools; in Townsend and the Fairview campus; and Bunker Hill, Brick Mill elementary schools and Redding Middle. It’s a wider region than they’ve done before, having typically stuck to the Middletown area.

“I think it was a need,” said Susan Austin, librarian for Bunker Hill Elementary. “We were just looking for ways to get out there and get kids excited about books and keep them reading. We have our libraries and we’re doing what we can here but anything that we could do to try and continue with other ways to encourage kids to read and to have books and that was just one of the things that we could do.”

The books are free, and the librarians try to give away little goodies too — pencils, bags, bookmarks. Books are laid out on tables, separated by different levels, running from pre-K all the way to adult. They also offered prepackaged grab bags for certain grade levels.

“I did have one dad who came up and said, ‘Where do I pay for these?’ And it was great to say, ‘You don’t have to pay for any of these,’” Ms. DeCapua said. “It was just so nice to be able to give back — and do what we love — but being able to give back to the community, right then and there, was awesome.”

The bookmobile will be back in March. As they gear up for that, they said they learned one lesson from February — they’ll need more books.

There were a few stops, Ms. Austin said, where most books were cleared out. (They are accepting donations; community members can contact any Appoqunimink school’s librarian to donate).

“We’ve been a little bit more picky about our donations so we try to take titles that are pretty current, and that are either new or gently used because one thing that we noticed is kids don’t want to come and pick out the old books that have been in Granny’s basement for years,” Ms. Klein said. “We’ve been really fortunate enough to kind of stockpile our collections so that we can offer some pretty good titles to our kids.”

While they’ve had a good response to the curbside programming at several of the schools, this program builds on that.

One, it helps them get into their communities, Ms. Klein said.

“Just building that community relationship by stepping outside of our schools, and going into the neighborhoods where our kids live is really important, to just building trust and relationships between the school and the community,” she said.

But it’s also about access.

“This is more accessible to more kids throughout the whole district,” she said. “This way, we’re able to get books into the hands of more kids districtwide than just in our own schools.”

Books can be expensive, too Ms. Austin said.

“Kids aren’t really looking for prices, they’re looking for what they want to read. This gives them the choices,” she said. “There were so many choices and they were all good books that they want to read. They’re interested in reading so it gives them more of an opportunity to read because they don’t have to spend money, especially now where you know the financial need is bigger with what’s going on in the world.”

For the kids who showed up, it was exciting, she said.

“A lot of people think like, ‘Oh, you know, he’s going to go pick up some books,’ and then when you see kids come and like they light up when they find something they really like or somebody has read to them already or they’re familiar with. They’ve seen it in the classroom, I mean it’s amazing,” she continued. “It just fills you up with so much joy, knowing that you know we’re providing something to them that is going to help them to be a better reader in the long run.”

Ms. Austin agreed.

“At the most recent event — this was my first one as a librarian sitting through and watching — but the kids would come up and kind of look for a guide for where they should start — ‘I’m looking for chapter books, which basket should I go to?’” Ms. Austin said. “So they were very excited to know that there was a lot for them to choose from.”

These books are theirs to keep — or to donate back, and the cycle can start again.

“I think their relationship with that book is a little different than possibly a book that they pick up from the library because they have the ownership of it. It’s theirs to keep now,” she said.

The hope is to keep the program going through the rest of the year amid COVID-19, which has schools mostly operating in a mix of virtual and in-person learning. Ms. Klein hopes that in the next year, they can have a van or trailer that contributes to the effort.

“I mean it’s so important that our kids are reading, especially now that we’re in a hybrid-type of situation and kids are on screens more than ever now,” Ms. Klein said. “The idea of having books in houses for kids to read is extremely important to enhancing their education.”

Staff writer Brooke Schultz can be reached at 741-8272

or bschultz@newszap.com.