After the former Gales Creek Elementary building was shuttered in 2011, a victim of severe budget cuts, Corrie Bates decided to withdraw her older son, who’d completed first grade at the tiny 152-year-old school, from the Forest Grove School District.

He and her younger son, who’ll enter kindergarten next month, start classes at a private school in Verboort in three weeks.

But Bates, along with longtime Gales Creek resident Joyce Sauber, parent Melinda Fischer and several dozen others, are closely monitoring events at the school and are fighting a plan to remove books from the former school’s library.

A month ago, district leaders said Gales Creek’s library books, many purchased with money from bequests and the school’s Parent-Teacher Organization, were slated for disbursement to other K-4 schools in Forest Grove this summer. The volumes remained inside the library this week, many piled up against the campus’s west side windows, as Sauber, Bates and others continued to appeal to the district to keep things that way.

“The larger community is not happy about the books being moved,” Bates said.

Sauber sent a letter to Superintendent Yvonne Curtis July 29, pleading with her to

leave the library intact as a community resource. Gales Creek resident Sharon Boge delivered a similar letter to the district administration office on Aug. 8.

Curtis sent Sauber — long considered the rural community’s unofficial historian — a two-sentence reply by email the next day, promising to respond to her before the beginning of the school year.

That communication hasn’t yet taken place, Sauber said Tuesday.

Petition draws 30 signers

In the meantime, Bates mounted a petition campaign to keep the books inside the building, which now houses the Gales Creek Therapeutic Day School, a program for a small contingent of special education students with behavioral issues.

She turned in the petition, which bears 30 signatures and claims other grade schools in Forest Grove “have little to no space for any additional books,” to Curtis and members of the school board on Aug. 8.

“We’d like to feel that the school district wants to work with the parents,” Bates said this week while shooing her boys out the door for a day of summer camp. “But they don’t have a very good track record there.”

District spokeswoman Connie Potter said in mid-July that the Gales Creek books would be used to fill in gaps in the collections of other school libraries.

Library access more difficult

The petition points out that children living in Gales Creek have a harder time accessing a library than do children who live closer to Forest Grove’s downtown city library. “Keeping books here gives them a convenient option to access books, increase their reading skills and develop a lifelong love of books,” it reads.

And, though the petitioners do not dispute the books are district property, they argue that the Gales Creek School library “was built and supported by community members” long before it was part of the Forest Grove School District.

“Many families gave funds for the library with the expectation that local children would be able to access the books,” Bates’ petition claims.

In a cover letter accompanying the petition sheets, Bates also asked Curtis to re-enable an electronic check-out system that kept track of the ins and outs of volumes borrowed by Gales Creek children during the last year of the former elementary’s operation, 2010-11.

“We know the children of this valley would utilize and appreciate the library that their community worked so hard to build for them,” Bates wrote.