By Emilie Gilbert
Herald Intern
Primrose Schools in the Orlando metropolitan area donated over 1,500 books to local organizations through Og’s Bountiful Book Drive.
The month-long book drive, named after a classroom puppet character, Og, has been held since 2021 to promote literacy.
Primrose School of Oviedo donated books to Transformation Village Bithlo. Primrose School of Winter Springs donated books to Patmos Chapel Seventh-day Adventist Church.
Primrose Schools of Lake Mary Heathrow and Longwood at Wekiva have developed a close partnership with AdventHealth’s West Lakes Early Learning Center, a provider of health, wellness and social services to children. The schools donated over 840 books to the learning center in 2026.
Juliet Beltran, co-director at Primrose School of Lake Mary Heathrow, said the initiative extends beyond book collection for students because they incorporated lessons on generosity, engaged students in decorating donation boxes and integrated book counting into math instruction for preschool and pre-K classes.
“They really enhance our learning curriculum to make it super fun,” Beltran said.
The books went to the homes of families with children at the West Lakes Early Learning Center.
“It really helps those families be able to provide for their children, even if they're going through hard times in their home life... early literacy and reading is going to be a kind of stepping stone for their entire future,” Beltran said.
Primrose students helped collect and load the buses that delivered the books. Primrose staff oversaw the donation distribution, including Sabrina Boesch, the franchise owner of Primrose Lake Mary Heathrow and the Primrose in Longwood at Wekiva Springs.
“It was really sweet to donate that day, then to see the parents coming in with the children and grabbing books,” Boesch said. “It's really powerful to see how important literacy is in a child's life.”
