The Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors honored a 17-year-old Eagle Scout in mid-December for his role in developing a library for the 2,300 inmates at the county House of Correction.
Brian Grochowski spent 65 hours coordinating a team of volunteers who collected a total of 1,900 books for the library. The high school junior from Franklin, Wisconsin, recruited 54 people to help him conduct book drives and solicit donations as a scout project. The Franklin School District contributed 24 bookcases that were no longer in use.
Grochowski admits he got the idea from his mother, Karen, an educational assistant for Franklin Public Schools, who found out from a colleague that some young inmates didn’t have high school diplomas yet.
“This was a young man with a vision,” Susan Harrington, who has operated the library since May 1999, told the December 27 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “When his books came in, it looked like a gold mine. It was wonderful.”
Posted January 1, 2001.