A real NMLP pickup · Friday, June 5, 2026
A charter high school clears its shelves
An end-of-year call from Gilbert L. Sena Charter High School in the far Northeast Heights. Surplus classroom books and retired class sets — Invisible Child, Just Mercy, Always Running — boxed and gone in one free pickup. The part that makes a school cleanout different from any other: most of these books never reached a shelf at my warehouse. They went straight back into Albuquerque classrooms.
The call came from Gilbert L. Sena Charter High School — 69 Hotel Circle NE, a small APS-authorized charter for grades 9–12 tucked off Central on the far east side. It was the last stretch of the school year, and anyone who has worked in a school knows what that means for the book room: shelves of class sets that didn't get used this year, donated paperbacks that piled up, retired curriculum, and a hard deadline to clear the space before staff scatter for the summer. Elizabeth Chapman reached out. The surplus needed to be gone, and the school wanted it to land somewhere that wasn't a dumpster.
A school's options here are worse than they look from the outside. The chain thrifts won't send a truck for a classroom cleanout, and they would condition-reject most of it at the dock anyway. Recycling haulers will take it — straight to the bale, books and all. District surplus channels move slowly and usually only want current, matched, in-demand sets. That leaves the school staff to box, haul, and dispose of it themselves, on their own time, during the one week of the year when nobody has any. So I put it on the calendar and drove out.
What came out of the book room was a classic end-of-year classroom mix. The backbone was class sets — twenty-plus matched copies of a single title, the kind a teacher orders for a whole-class read and then rotates out. Invisible Child by Andrea Elliott, the 2022 Pulitzer Prize winner. The young-adult adaptation of Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy. Luis J. Rodriguez's Always Running. Gordon Korman's Schooled. Around the class sets sat the rest of it: single-copy classroom-library paperbacks, a shelf of career-and-technical reference (a culinary Ready-Set-Serve box, a technology survey text), and the general donated overflow every school book room accumulates by June.
None of it needed sorting, and none of it had to be in resale condition. That is the whole point of how I take a school cleanout: condition-agnostic, no minimum, and no pre-sorting asked of the staff. Boxes, totes, loose stacks — I load all of it and sort it on the back end. The school's only job was to point at the room. Everything after that was mine.
Where the Sena books went: back into Albuquerque classrooms
Here is what makes a school cleanout different from an estate pickup. These weren't obscure regional titles bound for the archive — they were exactly the books Albuquerque teachers are looking for right now. So most of them never went into resale at all. The class sets, led by a full crate of Invisible Child (above), went straight to the Read to Me! ABQ Network book room at 601 Yale SE.
Read to Me! ABQ Network runs that book room out of the old city transit maintenance facility, and Albuquerque teachers come in and pull titles for their classrooms off its shelves. As their coordinator told me this week, they had “just had several teachers come by to get books for their book clubs and for students.” A matched class set of a Pulitzer-winning book is precisely what a high-school book club or a whole-class read needs and can almost never afford to buy new. Dropping twenty-plus copies of Invisible Child into that room means a teacher can walk out with a full semester's reading for an entire class, free. I keep them stocked with my overflow the rest of the year, too, and lend a hand on pickups when they need one.
Everything that wasn't a classroom fit went into the regular NMLP stream: resale on the titles that carry it — which is what funds the next free pickup — Little Free Library restocks around the metro, and the regional pulp recycler for the genuinely unsalvageable. As Sena's own review put it, the books got “donated and recycled through the proper ways.” Nothing from this pickup went to a landfill.
What happened to the rest of the load
Not everything in a school cleanout is a class set. The Sena load also had the single-copy classroom-library paperbacks, a shelf of career-and-technical reference — a culinary Ready-Set-Serve binder, a technology survey text — and the general overflow a book room collects by June. Those don’t move as sets, so they follow the same routing every NMLP pickup does: the titles with resale value go to Amazon and eBay and fund the next free run; the kids’ and general-interest paperbacks restock Little Free Libraries around the metro; and the genuinely unusable goes to the regional pulp recycler, not the landfill. One school’s surplus, sorted by hand into four or five destinations — none of them a dumpster.
“Josh was amazing and a true life saver for our school. He was kind and so incredibly helpful. It feels so nice that we are able to get our books donated and recycled through the proper ways. This is amazing community outreach!”
Elizabeth Chapman — Gilbert L. Sena Charter High School · left on Google, June 5, 2026
Got a book room, classroom, or office to clear?
Schools, teachers, charters, churches, and offices across the Albuquerque metro: end-of-year cleanout, retired class sets, book-room overflow, or a single shelf. No minimum, no condition limit, no sorting required. Free.