By EMILY BEHLMANN

Click Photo to Purchase Photo Reprints!

ebehlmann@gctelegram.com

The white bus, decorated with colorful lettering and pictures, was met with applause when it pulled up in front of the community center at East Garden Village. About 40 children, most of them summer school students at Charles O. Stones Intermediate Center, filed on, rifled through boxes of books and made their selections.

For Antonio Adame, 11, the choice was "A Picture Book of John F. Kennedy," by David A. Adler and Robert F. Casilla. He said he knows some about Kennedy, like that he was a president and that his face is on the half-dollar, but that he could learn more from the book.

"It looks good and it has pictures," he said.

It was Tuesday morning in the summer at East Garden Village, and that means a visit by B.O.B. and L.I.S.A.

B.O.B. (Books On the Bus) is a USD 457 Garden City program that brings children's books to various Garden City and Holcomb locations on Mondays through Thursdays in June and July.

"The goal is to have kids get books," said Pierceville-Plymell Elementary School librarian Kerma Crouse, who helps operate the program.

L.I.S.A. (Lunch Is Served Alright) accompanies B.O.B. at its Garden City stops. Funded by the Kansas State Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the bus provides sack lunches to children 18 and younger as part of the government's Summer Food Service Program, according to the school district.

On B.O.B., children don't formally "check out" books like they would at a library, Crouse said. Instead, they take out one book on their first visit, then exchange it the next time they come, she said.

She said B.O.B. planners try to make visits to the bus fun for the children by finding books that suit their interests.

Many of the books are discarded from school libraries, which have to make room for new items, and others are donated by individuals, Crouse said. Some are written in Spanish, she said, because English-speaking and non-English-speaking parents alike are encouraged to read to their children.

Besides just being fun, though, B.O.B. serves an educational purpose by reducing what educators call "summer learning loss," according to Crouse.

A 1996 study by led by researcher H. Cooper concluded that all children experience learning losses when they don't engage in educational activities over the summer, and that low-income youth experience greater loss than their higher-income peers.

The study, called "The Effects of Summer Vacation on Achievement Test Scores: A Narrative and Meta-analytic Review" showed that low-income students lost an average of two months' worth of reading progress over the summer.

But reading and other activities that keep children thinking during their time off can help, Crouse said.

"If they just read a little bit, it keeps them going," she said.