Using Bibliotherapy to Promote Students’ Adjustment to School David Manier Lehman College – City University of New York School can be stressful under the best of circumstances, and even more so for children and adolescents who have special needs, or who come from disadvantaged backgrounds. It is the responsibility of teachers and administrators to take this into consideration, and while maintaining high academic standards, to try to mitigate the negative or harmful aspects of stress (or more accurately, distress) to the extent that is feasible. There are many ways to mitigate stress, such as counseling and self-help programs. Cost-effectiveness always has to be considered, especially in contexts where financial resources are extremely limited. This chapter describes a cost-effective intervention to mitigate stress that I have been studying in recent years, together with my research assistants, at Lehman College - City University of New York. In the United States, many public universities (like Lehman College) have problems with student persistence, that is, the percent of students who succeed in graduating from college within six years after matriculation (Horn, 1996; Horn & Premo, 1995). When rates of student persistence are low (less than fifty percent), this often reflects the intensity of the stresses faced by students, especially those who are disadvantaged in terms of socioeconomic status, social support, and/or academic preparation. The intervention that I have been working on for the past several years has implications for academic retention and student persistence in a university context, but also for student success in secondary school. This intervention combines emotional disclosure with bibliotherapy. Emotional disclosure (ED) is based on the widely accepted view that expressing one’s emotions verbally can have a variety of benefits (cf. DeSalvo, 1999; Pennebaker, 1995, 1997a, 1997b, 2002). For example, most forms of psychotherapy (including cognitive-behavioral,