Tales from a Loud Librarian

Several years ago, the Advocacy Toolkit committee from AASL (American Association of School Librarians) called for members to submit stories with examples of library advocacy in their libraries. The toolkit was getting revised. I wrote a story about how the Louisiana school librarians fought the state board of education (BESE). The librarians were asking BESE not to revise the librarian section in the bulletin that outlines how superintendents and principals should govern K-12 schools. I submitted my story two years ago and forgot about it. I received an email earlier this summer asking for a picture because they had planned to publish my story. The toolkit was published on June 25, 2015.  Open here to read the Louisiana library success story and more; scroll down to the bottom of the page to find my story. 

I am a big fan of infographics. They tell a story quickly with research data, and as a visual learner, they make it easy for me to understand and remember what I am reading. There have been many created recently in the field of education. I haven't made my first one yet, but I certainly like to share them when I find a good one. The following infographic was created by the National Center for Literacy Education (NCLE) and was posted on the American Association of School Librarians' (AASL) website .  Collaboration is an important component of 21st Century Skills, and librarians are great models for collaboration as you can see below. Also, librarians engage in professional development for lifelong learning and share what they learn with other teachers. I love being part of a profession that values learning beyond the classroom, beyond the school building, beyond the district and so on. Visit AASL , and you can download your own copy of this infographic. 

Just last week I blogged about the importance of being an advocate for your school library and in so doing you will be an advocate for all school libraries. Little did I know that less than seven days after writing that post the need for advocacy would reach a critical point in Louisiana. The Board of Elementary and State Education (BESE), which is the Louisiana state board of elected and appointed officials, has decided that they can help reform the schools by amending Bulletin 741. This is the handbook that the administrators in all districts must use as the guidelines for managing all public schools. The title page and forward is pictured below. Click the above image to enlarge Then the other day, a librarian in northern Louisiana sent out a link to Bulletin 741 with all the points in the document that BESE wants to cut. There are lines drawn through many of the resolutions, but it is Chapter 17, section 1705 that makes me sick. I have made a copy of this section for ...

One of my colleagues at school is a big proponent of teachers' rights and believes that the teachers' unions are crucial for good public schools. This is an idea that has gotten a lot of flak lately, but I agree with him. However, there is one point that we often discuss and always disagree. Advocacy. He is a classroom teacher and thinks that his good teaching stands on its own and that he doesn't need to prove how hard he works by talking about what goes on in his classroom. He doesn't know what I have gone through as a librarian over the last twenty years, and how important it has been to broadcast about what goes on in a school library.  Two PFTSTA students enjoying the library I explain to him that it is vital that librarians shout about all the wonderful activities happening in their library. I do just that with this blog, the library website , twitter , email blasts, discussions with my principal, notices in the daily memo and articles in the school mont...

I have been blogging for awhile. I have had four separate and very different kinds of blogs. There was a particular impetus for creating each one of them. However, each time I had a purpose and goal in mind. The blogs evolved over time, especially this one, but I always knew the kind of message that  I wanted to impart.  I began blogging in 2005 when I returned to New Orleans after being in exile for 6 weeks due to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Our friend, Christian Crumlish  (aka mediajunkie ), had recently started a web magazine and encouraged us to blog about our experiences. Blogging was still new. My husband and I felt that we had a lot to say. Everyone returning home from their exile had a distinctive experience, and the world was watching.  We were lucky because our house was located in the sliver by the river, so we experienced no flooding. There was some minimal exterior damage to our home, and the gutters had to be replaced. Our home was...

Click here to download the entire program I have already blogged about the awesome award that I won from the American Association of School Librarians, a division of the American Library Association. The official photographs were released last week, so I want to post them here as I like to use this blog as my professional portfolio. On June 25, 2012, I was given the 2012 Information Technology Pathfinder Award at the secondary level. The picture above shows the cover of the program from the event. The picture below is the program page from the IT Pathfinder award. I won the secondary division of the program. This amazing librarian from Minnesota, Sally Mays, won the elementary division. It was an honor to win with Sally. She is so dynamic. I love meeting librarians with energy like hers.  Click on the picture to enlarge it for easy reading Each award presented at the ceremony was sponsored by a different vendor. Follett Software Company sponsored the IT Pathfinde...

Okay, I try to stay on top of things, but somehow missed this list. Last May, as Nancy Everhart (at the time she was president of AASL) was finishing her Vision Tour of excellent school libraries around the country, she announced 100 things that students would miss if school librarians were eliminated from schools. As I read this list, I see so many of the activities that I do day in and day out in the library at Patrick Taylor Academy. I decided to post the list here so I will remember it, but also for others who might have missed this last year just like I did. Besides, we need to be reminded why we are so important to a school's culture. 100 Things Kids Will Miss If they don’t have a School Librarian in their School Released by Dr. Nancy Everhart (everhart@fsu.edu) Past President, American Association of School Librarians (AASL) May 19, 2011 Books that are professionally selected to meet school and personal needs. Equitable access to computers and other forms of techno...

I have lots more to share about the 2012 ALA annual conference. One of the ultimate highlights for me was winning the Information Technology Pathfinder Award from the American Association of School Librarians (AASL). This award is given to two librarians, one at the elementary level and the other at  the secondary level for their innovative approaches to information technology in the school library. On the first night that I arrived in Anaheim, I am walking through the exhibit hall and see a familiar name, Sally Mays , on the name tag of the person walking by me. Sally was the elementary division winner of the IT Pathfinder Award. We jumped up and down together a bit and shared what winning this award has done for us and our libraries. Both of us were blown away when we received the news that we had won. Unfortunately, we didn't meet up again until the award ceremony on Monday morning, but through social media we should be able to keep in touch. This is the first award ceremo...

Below is my acceptance speech for the AASL Information Technology Pathfinder Award Secondary. I wanted to post the entire speech because some of the people that I thank were not able to attend the luncheon where I received the award. This was definitely one of the huge highlights of a 30 year teaching career, 21 years as a school librarian.  Let me tell you that running a school library is the best job on Earth! Winning this award makes me smile, big time. I am very excited to accept this award from AASL today. Winning this helps validate for me all the hard work that I have done over my 30 years of teaching.  In ‘91 I left the classroom to become a school librarian. I took over a library that had a Macintosh SE computer running a circulation program that no one else in my district was using. I had to back up the library on dozens of floppy disks, and we still used a card catalog. Now let’s fast forward 21 years later, my students can download an app on the...

I started a book on April 19th. I know this because I logged it in on Good Reads . I just finished it on Sunday. Whew! I was off for a week during that time. You would think that I could read a young adult book faster than that. I liked the book, but my life got in the way. I will spend lots of my free time reading, but when visitors come in to town, and the festival season starts in New Orleans; it is hard to curl up with a book. When I attended the AASL conference in October, a member of the YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults committee told me that she reads a book a day. I love to read, but I want to savor a book, so racing through it in a day will not allow me to enjoy or internalize it at all. I can never remember character names now. If I read a book a day, then reading the book would be useless to me because I would not remember how the book made me feel or allowed the book to get under my skin and change how I think. Right now I have some reading deadlines looming over me....

Click here to open article with picture I could not decide what to write next, and then I heard some news that I have to share. Last week I received word from the American Association of School Librarians (AASL), a division of the American Library Association, that I was selected to receive the Information Technology Pathfinder Award for 2012. In June I will receive the award at the AASL awards luncheon held during the annual ALA conference in Anaheim. I applied for this award at the beginning of the year. It was the most intense application that I have ever had to do. There were twelve sections, and each section required anywhere from 500 to 1000 words. I used our winter break to fine tune the application which was due February 1st. By mid-January, I had finished it and sent it off. I tried not to think about it. I really had no clue if what I do in my postage stamp-sized library in Jefferson, LA could compete at the national level. Now I know that I can compete. That is...

When Lisa Valence and I heard that we won the Gale TEAMS Award in September, we thought that we would receive $2500 and that would be it. Who knew this was an honor that would keep on giving and giving, even several months later. Gale Cengage sent us to the American Association of School Librarian's Conference in Minneapolis in October and held a reception there in our honor. We have a year's subscription to Library Media Connection magazine, and we are waiting to receive the cash award along with $500 in Gale products and some Linworth products, too. Library Media Connection asked us to write an article for their magazine describing the collaborative project that we submitted for the award.  The icing on the cake is this marvelous video that Gale had produced about Patrick Taylor Academy and the project that we designed to teach the social studies research paper. The video was shown at the Gale booth in the exhibit hall during the AASL conference (over and over ag...

Though I have not been posting many book reviews, I have had lots to write over the last couple of months. You may think that I am not reading, but that is not the case. I have been reading some amazing books. It's just that I am doing so many other things that I want to blog that my book reviews never happen to find their way into print. During AASL in Minneapolis, I was invited to an intimate luncheon courtesy of Little Brown . (Thanks, Victoria, lunch was delicious.) The luncheon was the debut of Kelly Barnhill , a Minnesotan author, and her first book, The Mostly True Story of Jack . This is the book that got me through my plane ride home. The story has a male protagonist and is geared for the middle school student. I love having a strong story about a boy for this age level. Jack is dumped at his Aunt and Uncle's house in Iowa. His parents live in California and believe with their impending divorce that Jack is better off  in a small town for the summer...

We have been waiting and asking that the district add the news of the Gale Teams Award to the homepage of the website. Finally, they did. Here is a link to the article on the Jefferson Parish Schools website:  http://www.jppss.k12.la.us/district/news/Blog.aspx?id=2147506012&blogid=2147485652 .

 So much has happened in the last week. I don't know where to start. Attending the AASL conference in Minneapolis was a great experience. I have lots of ideas running through my head. I hope to implement some of them over the next couple of months. I need to make some decisions in my library on how to spend money on electronic books. I have a collection of over 350 reference in electronic format, but I want to start purchasing non-fiction titles that the students would use as supplemental material to their textbooks. During the conference I talked to Rosen Publishing about their ePoint Books and Follett about their Follett Shelf, and of course I can always add to to our existing Gale Virtual Reference Library.  There are some super-star librarians out there who are doing amazing things. Listening to them talk about all that they do means that some of them must never sleep. I got to meet a few of them during the conference, and I was really inspired by the information that the...

Can't wait until tomorrow. I will be heading to the AASL conference to enjoy the wisdom of all the other school librarians whom I will meet. I am also going to receive the Gale TEAMS Award for Middle School. Hope to have lots of pics and video to show you afterwards. This conference is one of the best because it is the only national conference that is geared towards school librarians. The only sessions that really don't interest me are the ones for the elementary level. Years ago those were the only sessions that I attended. Can't wait, and I will be ready for the cold weather.

I will miss the kids, but I am thrilled about having the opportunity to attend the only national conference dedicated to school librarians. Whoo! Whoo!

In May, one of our English teachers asked if I would work on a grant with her. She was looking to fund sets of books to use for teaching her 7th graders. The grant was sponsored by Gale and Library Media Connection. It was not a whole lot of money, but we thought that it was real doable. For the Gale Teams Award we had to highlight a collaborative project that was designed to address a problem or need, explain our goals and strategies and how we met these objectives. During the 2010-11 school year, Lisa Valence and I worked together to help the students write the research paper for the annual social studies fair. We broke down the research process in small bites for the students, and we felt that we had succeeded in achieving our goals. This was the program that we highlighted in the grant. Today we received the following email: (Click on the image to enlarge it)   There were a total of 3 winners in the whole country, and we won the middle school division!!!! Gale is send...