Visor Books
        Reading is Back!!

Excerpt

Introduction

The lights were out at Bland Elementary, except for one tiny room.

The principal, Mr. Warbolowski, sat buried in a paperwork tomb.

Test scores were down, behavior a mess, the parents were becoming less active.

Student referrals were at an all-time high and his threats were no longer effective.

“What more can I take?” Mr. Warbolowski asked and his assistant began to remark—

“I took their recess, their specials, their parties and games. I make them eat in the dark!

And still it is here. From Eddie to Taylor to Timmy to Tommy to Jenny—

A handful of disruptive children . . . disrupting the chance of the many.”

And then it came—like a thunderbolt—he looked up with a scowl.

It was an idea so perfect, so simple, so dastardly, and fowl.

“Bungalow 29,” he said, his mind racing a mile a minute.

“We’ll build it on the far edge of school and put all these students in it!

The babies, the cheaters, the tattletales, the disrupters and fighters and screamers

The weirdos, the slobs, the gas passers, the dirty kids and dreamers.

We’ll build a portable for them, so when school starts next fall

They’ll have a place that they can go—one room to house them all.”

He flipped through his pages and picked the teacher, a man named Mr. Wright.

Then he and Ms. Gunn compiled a list of students that very night.

Sixty-two children they crammed in this room, this room that was filled with magic.

Sixty-two children with sixty-two stories—many of them quite tragic.

In a bungalow so far away no one ever knew where is it.

In a bungalow so far away no one ever came to visit.

But the stories got out. The stories survived. I’ll tell them as I was told.

The stories of sixty-two children . . . no more than twelve years old.