I’m the manager of a small branch of a large library system. I don’t have a children’s librarian on staff, but the children’s librarians at the main library choose the books for the collection. A parent has filed a formal complaint that my staff allowed her nine-year-old daughter to check out Deenie by Judy Blume. How should I handle this?

It sounds as if there are two issues: (1) A problem with your staff (2) A complaint against the book. Make sure that the mother understands that it’s never the role of the librarian to monitor what children read. Then invite the mother to file a book reconsideration form, which I assume is part of your library system’s policy. Deenie is appropriate for most nine-year-olds. The mother needs to tell her daughter if she doesn’t want her to read it. I do think it wise to ask the children’s librarians at the main library to conduct a workshop in children’s services for your staff. They may need reassurance about their roles.

A seventh-grade student brought his mother’s ereader to class on the last day of school. He passed it around so that students could read passages from Fifty Shades of Grey. It created an uproar and the teacher came to the library to ask my help. I really didn’t know what to do.

This is no different from my generation passing around dog-eared copies of Peyton Place. Don’t make a big deal out of the situation. In the future, advise the teacher to simply ask the student to focus on class work and continue reading the book when he gets home.

My friend’s son (an advanced eighth-grade student in the middle school where I’m a librarian) may take ninth-grade English for credit. The summer reading selection for ninth-graders in the school district is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. He is registered for freshman English in the fall, but she doesn’t want him to read the novel. I was her easiest target because she doesn’t know the English teacher. I didn’t know how to handle this.

Do you know for a fact that students weren’t given a reading choice? Many school districts allow students to make a summer reading selection from a list of books provided by English teachers. This accommodates various interests and maturity levels. If this isn’t the case, then the mother has a choice. She can elect to take her son out of the class and put him in regular eighth-grade English. If she insists that he stay in the class, then he needs to complete the requirement. It sounds as if she will listen to you.

I’m taking an online course in children’s services from a university that is located in another part of the country. I have an issue with some of the theories about public library services to children. In my public library system, children are welcome to use the entire library collection. The professor defines children as birth to 11 years old. This makes me feel that I have to defend the policy of my library system.

Children should have free and open access to books and materials. Most children will reject what they aren’t ready for, especially if they don’t feel the materials are forbidden. What about 12- and 14-year-olds who simply want to continue using the children’s room? Does this professor think that they should be banned because they grew up? Your library is on the right track.

Another elementary school in my district had several challenges last year. Since my school library has a number of parent volunteers, I thought it wise to provide them training in hopes of avoiding challenges in my school. What should I tell them?

Two main points: (1) Student privacy is a requirement (2) Leave reader guidance to you. I personally recommend that parent volunteers be used for more clerical types of jobs. If parents want to read aloud to students, then make the reading choice together. Never ask a parent to read aloud something they aren’t comfortable reading.

This winter, I wrote about working with administrators (and becoming one) in “The Same Difference” (SLJ, Feb. 2013, p. 20–23). After a full year in my new role, I continue to reflect on the ways teacher librarians can better connect and work with building and district leaders. This theme will be part of the SLJ Leadership Summit in Austin, September 28–29. Call it convergence or detente, librarians and administrators will be engaged in some exciting conversations in the coming year. In preparation, here are two useful ways to think and work like an admin.

The pivot: an administrator’s view

I miss the relative simplicity of the library. While a library includes many moving parts, it is not always necessary to know how or why things work so long as they do work. Teacher librarians are often better connected to various school and district systems than classroom teachers, but their understanding may still be limited. They are likely to know which textbooks are used by different departments or grade levels and how to order them, and may have some responsibility for their management. But at the district level, a complex machinery of processes, policies, and departments must work together in order to ensure students and teachers get materials. Seeing things from that perspective can help improve library service and the library’s place in an institution.

The points

More moving parts. As an administrator, I have learned that almost nothing is simple, even in a well-aligned district such as ours. There are always more moving parts than meet the eye. Understanding those parts and what it takes to keep them moving has become essential to my work. Teacher librarians stand to benefit by developing similar institutional knowledge. By learning the complexity of their organizations, they can become better informed, connected, and placed to advocate for their programs. This learning can come from developing authentic relationships with administrators. And because principals often see things differently from administrators, teacher librarians should seek to develop relationships at both building and district levels, ideally with the curriculum and IT departments that often intersect with library programs.

It’s important not to start the relationship with an “ask.” Offer to sit on a committee or offer support of a building or district initiative. Build a trusting professional friendship over time. Eventually, you will better understand the complexity of your district, and your new administrative friends may gain a better knowledge of your library and program.

Leading as a team. Administrators rarely make decisions alone. Despite their job titles, few administrators act unilaterally, and the best rely on others to provide advice and guidance in forming policies and solutions. By contrast, as a teacher librarian, I made many—if not most—decisions with little input from others. Since few outsiders understand what happens in school libraries, many teacher librarians have more autonomy than principals. This opacity and insularity can be a problem. Connecting with other stakeholders adds valuable input, information, and ideas. Almost everything I did this year involved a team to help envision, plan, and implement projects and programs. Likewise, teacher librarians can benefit by forming teams with other stakeholders. While it will probably complicate and slow decision making, it will also expose their library programs to wider audiences.

Teacher librarians should also build professional learning communities with others in their districts and beyond. At the building level, consider forming a steering committee to better understand the needs of parents, teachers, and students. This can provide insight and inform decisions while building bridges with stakeholders.

Teacher librarians have much in common with administrators. Find ways to build relationships with them. Listen and learn how decisions are made. In doing so, you can better understand the complex machinery of educational organizations and what makes administrators tick.

Mark Ray (Mark.Ray@vansd.org), a former teacher librarian, is the director of instructional technology and library services for Vancouver (WA) Public Schools.

It’s the beginning of the school year and you’re being pulled in a million different directions. Your days are full to the brim as you get to know new students and their families, plan curriculum with colleagues, and consider the most effective teaching strategies and cutting-edge resources.

This school year we will be shifting the focus of our column to strategies for integrating curriculum content, Common Core State Standards [CCSS], content standards, and literature. What role can inquiry play? How can we harness an inquiry-based approach to teaching and learning as a tool for integrating curriculum? And, what role does literature play in this curriculum?

We’ll be putting these various pieces together, a job that we believe is crucial, yet still largely incomplete. We’ll provide you with snapshots of what inquiry and integration look like when you and your students are studying topics in science, math, and social studies at the primary, intermediate, and high school levels—models and ideas that you can expand and adjust to make your own.

Moving towards inquiry and integration raises a number of questions for us. When we integrate reading, writing, listening, and speaking in meaningful ways, we are meeting many of the expectations of the Common Core standards. But what does using children’s and young adult literature across the curriculum require in an era of the CCSS? How do we teach for depth while also incorporating the standards? Standards are not synonymous with curriculum. Authentic learning can only take place in the context of rich curriculum; it’s about encountering big ideas, raising and answering questions, and making sense of evidence. This is not done in a vacuum, but in the context of the study of science, math, history, literature, and the world around us.

Small Steps, Large Possibilities

We can begin the integration process by taking small steps that have large possibilities for further development. Both of us have used small sets of related books many times over the course of our teaching careers. We’ve referred to them as powerful pairs, triplets, and quads and text sets. Others have labeled sets of related books as clusters. The name is not as important as the idea that even a small group of carefully chosen books can jump-start a meaningful investigation.

Here’s an example of what we mean. In our upcoming columns, you will see the following template. This will be a springboard for ways in which you can frame an integrated unit that utilizes reading, writing, listening, and speaking as a tool for accessing content, and employs quality children’s and young adult literature of all genres to frame inquiry within a disciplinary lens. One month we might consider a sample unit for primary-grade science, another month a unit for high school social studies.

We look forward to journeying with you through this school year, throughout the content areas and up and down the K-12 grade span. In the context of your busy teaching lives, we hope that these curriculum snapshots will help teachers and school librarians to work and plan together to immerse students in investigations that matter.

Your students may choose to volunteer for military service; they will certainly become voters and taxpayers. As educators, it is essential that we teach them how to become informed citizens–to examine evidence and argument related to the issues that shape political opinion and decisions.

Missiles launched at Syria are likely to provoke a response that spills over into a future conflict. However, if Assad’s government is not forced to face the consequences of banned weapon use–assuming that it has indeed used them–we are deciding that the immoral and impermissible is acceptable. In the 1930s, in both Spain and Czechoslovakia, we saw that not standing up to dictators only encouraged them and lead to larger, more horrific, conflicts.

To attack Syria is to increase the chance that the rebels–many of whom are the sworn enemies of the United States– will win, or carve out a toxic territory of their own, a haven for global jihadists. This is what the Russians claim. Assad is secular leader, while the forces fighting against him include extreme Islamic militants. Yet to allow this president to murder with impunity is to continue the bloody family business; his infamous father slaughtered tens of thousands of his Muslim Brotherhood opponents.

Which is the world we want to live in?  One in which Syria is a failed state, where Al Qaeda cells flourish close to Israel and Turkey, or a world in which we accept the deaths of tens and even hundreds of thousands of civilians?

It seems to me that this is the topic and debate that our students should be reading about, learning about, and having right now. Evaluating evidence, point of view, and argument is as Common Core as it gets. As global citizens, our students must be able to get beyond headlines, read a variety of complex texts, and form opinions based on evidence. What should the role of the school librarian be in sharing information about current issues? Librarians can lead students to articles from international papers such as The New York Times; news sources such as Al Jazeera that present insights and perspectives that aren’t often visible in American coverage; and the websites of groups that are on the ground, for example, Doctors Without Borders.

How can we tell if chemical weapons were used? A perfect science assignment. Why would Assad use poison gas when he was winning the war and United Nations’ inspectors were about to arrive? A great question for social studies classes. Could the rebels have staged an attack on themselves in order to get international powers to attack Assad? Every child who has an older sibling understands that strategy: provoking the bigger kid to lash out so that s/he will take the blame.

Syria is not so far away–what we decide to do there will directly affect every student in your school. Right in front of our eyes events that may well have decade-shaping consequences are playing out. Librarians can provide the resources that allow students to parse the arguments and find their way to reasoned answers. We cannot stumble into war blindly, nor can we ignore the need for strong responses. We must take the sober, adult, responsibility of making hard choices. By providing students with evidence, librarians can help them to become the responsible citizens our nation requires.

It’s called “school reform” with a focus on “student achievement,” but I shudder to think where we have come as a nation that many public schools don’t have a library, and won’t ever get one unless someone can beg a grant from a foundation or corporation.

I saw this firsthand at the middle school/high school where I taught English in New York’s South Bronx. Touting itself as a model of school reform, this self-proclaimed “institute” was presented as a showcase of high standards and a passion for learning. Though set in the congressional district with the lowest per-capita income in the nation, the school was—the administration incessantly assured parents—the fast track to success.

The problem was, for its 350 students this school had little more than classrooms on the third floor of a former elementary school set between a hospital and a jail.

Dressed in uniforms resembling the old Catholic school outfit, the students looked the part of “scholars,” as the administration referred to them. But from what I could see, the kids really were just bit players in a tragedy entitled, “They Stole the American Public School Experience from Us and Called It Reform.”

A public school is supposed to have a music program. We only had a boom box and a bunch of drums and African gourds. A public school is supposed to have art. We had none. A public school is supposed to have a library. We didn’t.

We did, however, have a librarian. Ms. Page had been “thrust” upon our school when, after decades as the librarian in a large public high school, she was pushed out as it closed to make way for several new, smaller, reform-oriented “academies,” “institutes,” and “centers.” As a librarian without a library, she prepared a library-oriented bulletin board and was used as an administration utility player.

Sports? They were limited to baseball in a nearby park and basketball in the gym we shared with another school in the building. That is, until a teacher got a grant for an archery program that enabled a dozen ninth graders to spread out in the cafeteria after school to shoot at targets.

The power of grants became especially clear when the principal of the other small school in our building secured funding for a library. A hard-charging young fellow who knew his way around charities and foundations, he generated $500,000 a year from outside sources. He outdid himself with his school’s library.

Set on the second floor behind glass windows, it was a brand-new, high-tech oasis. It was gorgeous. Stack after stack of books, a line of brand-new computers. Carpet. Tables. Comfortable chairs.

Not that our students were permitted to use it while I taught there. I nonetheless led my eighth graders through for a tour, and they were dumbstruck. Even the most outrageous of them walked gently and touched nothing, knowing that this was a very special place.

Indeed it was. A school without its own library is now all too common. A crowd-sourced Google map, “A Nation Without School Libraries,” is dense with pins noting hundreds of schools—and school districts—without libraries or librarians.

Today, so much of what Americans have long taken for granted as the typical public-school experience is being eliminated—especially in schools opened under the banner of “school reform” and “student achievement.” Each year, as budgets shrink and test scores guide decisions, more and more school districts nationwide trim the “fat,” programs that enrich students’ lives culturally and help them grow and develop as people, but aren’t specifically academic. As a result, basics—even a school library—have become “extras” that are not taxpayer supported.

Once, students held bake sales and car washes to fund some activities. Now, principals, teachers, and parents have been forced to assume that role on a grand scale to pay for books, athletic equipment, after-school activities. Instead of cupcakes and soapsuds, they use today’s equivalent of the hat in hand—the grant application—to beg foundations and corporations to underwrite what, until recently, most Americans would have considered the birthright of students in our public schools.

John Owens is a former teacher and author of Confessions of a Bad Teacher, published by Sourcebooks.

As students around the country return to school, those in New York City are facing a future without certified school librarians, as the NYC Department of Education (DOE) has asked to be excused from a decades-old state mandate on minimum staffing requirements. The request for a “variance” from the law (Commissioner’s Regulation §91.2), filed August 9 with the New York State Education Department (see SLJ’s coverage, “Educators, Parents Fight NYC Bid to Bypass State Mandate for School Librarians,”), proclaims a sad lack of vision concerning the contribution librarians make to this great city. Mayor Bloomberg, surely this is not the kind of legacy you wish for? This is how we wisely invest in our future?

The Wall Street Journal reports that there are a meager 333 certified librarians serving the city’s 1,700 schools, after steady declines for years. We have reached a new, perhaps critical, low.

The timing couldn’t be worse for our schools. It’s been shown that kids in schools with librarians do better than those in schools without—a pretty simple and sufficient case. By whatever name (teacher librarian, media specialist, or librarian), these professionals deliver on basic literacy, digital literacy, research skills, college readiness, and much more. And, now, when all too many teachers lack training on the new Common Core standards, the city continues to defund this key human capital investment. This, just as the reaction to the first scores truly tests the implementation of the standards. We need the skills that media specialists bring to our schools.

The DOE should be positioning librarians to provide on-the-ground support for the implementation of the most significant educational initiative of our generation. School librarians are a natural source of professional development on materials—print or digital—and they can be a vital link to parents in explaining what to expect in the transition. Librarians, including those directly confronted by the NYC DOE’s move, are out front on the Common Core nationally. We’ve published several of them here.

The fact is there has been an ongoing disregard for the mandate itself. This law, in place for decades, articulates the will of the public for the public good. It is an expression of thoughtful process. Undermining it via a series of one-off executive decisions made by principals under immediate budgetary pressure is not how our social contract works best. Perhaps it is not such a bad thing that this penny-wise, pound-foolish cost-savings tactic has been brought out in the open—and back into the political process.

We don’t need what the DOE calls “equivalent service” in its August 9 letter. We don’t need vague assurances of “arrangements” and “steps” that will be taken to cope with this disinvestment. The NYC DOE’s request presents an opportunity for those of us who know what librarians do to challenge what’s been happening and to demand that the department take the lead in producing better educational results by supporting the deployment of the Common Core and those who are key to its success.

Will the DOE provide a vision of how to improve our children’s education? Or will it continue to cut costs in ways that at best seem small-minded?

Welcome back to school, people.

Rebecca T. Miller
Editor-in-Chief
rmiller@mediasourceinc.com

The new federal ConnectED initiative should bring fast connections to almost all schools and libraries within five years. The project, a combination of enhanced broadband connectivity and teacher development, aims to leverage private-sector innovations to benefit students. President Obama also highlighted the role of libraries as partners in improving digital citizenship. Now it’s up to us. What experiences could we provide to our students and patrons if we had superior broadband?

I have four personal Cs of connectivity: content, creation, community, and concurrency. The benefits of the first two are predictable. But the real power of ConnectED lies in the potential of the last two.

Content is the gift and curse of greater broadband. As bandwidth increases, content grows to fill network capacity. While we might imagine expanded content to mean more enriched ebooks and multimedia-enhanced databases, a huge portion of many school networks is clogged with security camera footage.

It doesn’t have to be that way. But libraries need to understand how network configurations and technologies like traffic shaping can provide better, consistent connectivity for all broadband traffic by throttling select bandwidth-hogging services. Security cameras, for example, could be capped at 30 percent of bandwidth. So streaming video to classrooms could have a guaranteed consistent level of performance.

There’s also the issue of net neutrality, which seeks a position that doesn’t favor content from certain Internet providers, and makes traffic-shaping technologies especially important to understand. Service providers could use these technologies to slow down access to content from competitors.

On to my next C. Increased bandwidth expands the capability to create. Schools and libraries could use new resources to publish student- and teacher-authored materials. Think flipped classrooms. Teacher lectures are being recorded with interactive whiteboards and/or cameras, and being pushed out for students to view outside of school. Libraries might record presentations to share with a broader audience, too.

This idea is inexorably linked to the third C: community. A school or library with gigabit broadband in a community without high-speed access will struggle. So, institutions must tackle community access issues first, perhaps even by becoming local hubs for Internet service delivery. Once things are running smoothly, schools and libraries could support their larger communities by providing high-tech services, content delivery, and the creation or publication of locally important content.

Finally, the “ConnectEDness” that comes with high-speed connectivity holds great potential. Approaching gigabit speeds, interactions start to feel concurrent. One can truly be present in real time, even from a distance, as opposed to experiencing the molasseslike lag of high latency. Imagine what libraries could do with that.

We could build a support network to create richer virtual author visits by providing a space in the local library with high-speed broadband. If every library had a multimedia studio space for creation, speakers could use the same hardware for high-quality virtual presentations that feel like a live experience.

This just scratches the surface of things to do with high-speed broadband. Now’s the time to dream big—and to talk big. Share ideas. Establish the need for bandwidth in libraries before it arrives. Then, cross your fingers and hope that ConnectED will push through the morass of politics.

Sure, the Web is a key resource for educators, but what’s the best way to share the good stuff you’ve collected with students and teachers and keep it all organized?

EduClipper may be an answer. The free tool, launched this spring, seeks to provide a one-stop solution for K–12 by giving educators and students a simple, easy-to-use destination for curating and sharing online.

EduClipper was created by Adam Bellow, a former teacher and son of a high-school librarian who also works as a K–12 technology consultant. After hearing from educators who sought a visual content curation platform that was student friendly and school safe, Bellow set out to create a solution.

After last year’s testing period, eduClipper launched to the public in May and is now used in more than 450 classrooms. Brad Currie, middle school vice principal and supervisor of instruction for the Chester (NJ) School District, uses eduClipper with the 150 educators in his district as a professional development resource. Jason Fisher, a fifth- and sixth-grade teacher at Riddells Creek Primary School in Victoria, Australia, shares it with his students as a collaborative research tool. Both sing eduClipper’s praises. “Staff members find eduClipper to be a great one-stop resource with huge potential in terms of their own professional development and promoting student collaboration,” says Currie. Fisher particularly likes that his students can comment on their sources in a description area provided within eduClipper.

EduClipper is tailor-made for K–12. Teachers and administrators can create accounts for students as young as five with varying levels of permissions. Do you want your students to interact only with content from your classroom? No problem. Do you prefer a curation tool that doesn’t allow comments? That’s doable, too. EduClipper offers a walled-garden approach that schools can adjust to fit their needs, instead of simply providing the private-world binary that’s all too familiar in online platforms.

Using eduClipper is simple, especially for those already familiar with online curation tools like Pinterest. Content can be “clipped” either through the eduClipper site or by using the bookmarklet tool in the browser. In addition to making it easy to clip links and images, the site also lets you grab video, documents, and embed code from creation tools on the Web bookmarklet—a great way to integrate student work from Google Drive.

While you can discover other eduClips and reClip them (this is similar to retweeting on Twitter or repinning on Pinterest), the site also offers collaborative clipboards where groups can add items to a shared space. These features are great, but the innovation that educators might appreciate most is one that generates formatted citations for online content. I hope that this will make that ever-helpful student citation, “it came from Google,” a thing of the past.

During our testing period, we ran into a few bugs that made our experience of browsing and clipping content less than seamless. When we brought up these problems with an eduClipper representative, we were told that the organization was aware of these issues and that fixes were currently in the works.

It’s tempting to compare the user experience of eduClipper with Pinterest or Pocket, a popular content-saving application. But those platforms are further along, so it’s an unfair comparison to make at this time. We’re looking forward to seeing eduClipper develop and work out its bugs, since the platform truly addresses a gap for K–12 students and educators.

Bellow says, “I think that teachers will find it a great way to connect to, build, or strengthen a personal learning network where they can curate with like-minded educators and find awesome content that they can use in their classroom or share with their students.”

EduClipper is free, available globally for K–12, and supports IE8+, Safari 3+, Firefox 4+, and Chrome. A mobile app version is in the works, though a launch date has not been set.

But what I noticed right off—and surely struck many of you—is that we need to stop talking about the Common Core State Standards in the singular. There is a whole set of distinct Common Core challenges, and we need to be clear sighted about what they are, and the tools needed to address them.

I realized some time ago that there was more than one kind of Common Core experience. For young children, in preschool or elementary, Common Core is and will be their school experience. Year after year they will be exposed to content-rich nonfiction and increasingly complex texts and vocabulary, and they will gain skills in close reading and mining textual evidence. But for the students already in middle, and especially, high school, the Common Core Standards present another challenge. The schooling they received and learned to negotiate does not match the assessments that require them to demonstrate the above-mentioned skills. We need to define the needs of students who are in free fall as well as those who are rising through the new system. That is step one. Step two is more difficult.

The New York State results put me in mind of a suggestion a principal made to me earlier this summer: we must disaggregate scores to determine which cohort is experiencing the sharpest decline. This principal, accustomed to the daily triage of deciding where to best use limited resources, recognized that the lowest scores are not seen evenly throughout our schools. The steepest drops in scores seem to be in the most challenged schools. This may seem self-evident, but it is not. The needs of students— and communities—vary. What are the needs of a school where many families have deep pockets and available resources versus the demands of a school where almost all of the support and instruction takes place within the school building? And the issue is not just the burdens the students face, but school policies. In my experience, struggling schools too often turn to programs—teaching scripts, mandated curricula, and (very) limited and structured reading requirements. The cure makes the ailment worse.

Here’s a project for those reading this column: Can we compare the Common Core outcomes of schools with parallel demographics, a first set with accredited full-time school librarians against another that uses aides and volunteers, or in which the librarian essentially checks out books? Does a librarian make a difference in outcomes? How? We all need to know that—but we won’t find out until we look past the headlines and into the numbers.

What’s to be done? In one sense, I think the New York results are encouraging. The Common Core standards were initiated because high school graduates were not prepared for the next stage in their lives. The recent assessments have allowed us to examine those gaps while the students are still in our buildings. We have time to help these students. But what resources must we adopt to do so? How can the deep thinking and engaged reading required by the Common Core standards be effectively taught in the schools where there the pass rate was between 0 to 5 percent? Can we develop Common Core assessments that address vocational needs? I can’t be the first person to ask these questions. I’m eager to learn what kinds of programs and interventions you have seen that are effective, ineffective, or produce middling results. Surely there are innovators and researchers who are blazing trails, testing ideas, and pointing the way for the rest of us.

The importance of advocacy is evident to us during a crisis. When our libraries are threatened or our staff faces cuts, then we leap into motion. But we should be mindful of advocacy every day. With social media tools, we can plan and effectively communicate our messages creatively and consistently throughout the year.

Before school begins this fall, take time to craft a strategy for how you will talk about your library projects through social media. Especially if you are a solo librarian, making a calendar can help keep you on track.

Getting started

In the past, I’ve tended to be rather organic in my approach to social media. This year, I will be more organized. I’m crafting my yearlong social media advocacy plan now by adding a set of dated activities for marketing and communicating what the library does for the school. I know I will get the message out to the administration, my community, and students if I have scheduled myself to do it.

First, find a calendar tool for your plan. Google Calendar is my choice, because you can set it up to send you a daily or weekly agenda as well as hourly calendar alerts. Events can be set daily, weekly, or monthly. Next, decide what social media tools to use and to whom your messages will be directed. Ask yourself: How do I want to impact students? Parents? Administrators? In what way can I best communicate with each group, and what do I want to say?

Students may prefer Twitter, while parents may connect with Facebook. Some principals prefer looking at data; others, like a former principal of mine, like video.

You also need to figure out quantity of outreach. What times of year, and how often, should you contact each group? Should you ping students weekly or daily? Do monthly messages work well for parents? For administrators, are quarterly communications best? Perhaps you are a frequent tweeter, and don’t need to schedule this. One librarian I know implements effective “Twitter Tuesdays.”

Target your social networking efforts to the time of year: . There are many opportunities both to plan activities inside the library and to talk about them outside the library. Sync your social media calendar to these events.

Assessing your efforts

At the end of each month, assess whether you have met your goals. If not, don’t criticize yourself. Evaluate whether your goals are too ambitious, or what you can do to better meet them. The idea is to be more purposeful in our advocacy and to use social media to help us get the word out. Sharing what we do and inviting the larger community into our work is always valuable, not only for advocacy, but also for fostering a sense of community.

Carolyn Foote is a “technolibrarian” at Westlake High School in Austin, TX. She blogs at Not So Distant Future.

This year, on the first day of school, I discovered that my principal had decided that the best use of the library was to house large study halls every period of the day, nominally “supervised” by disinterested faculty members. Last year, I lost part of the library as an in-school suspension space for several months; next year, I’m losing the library computer lab one period every day.

When the school formed a committee to design research at each grade level, my colleague (now former colleague) and I were not invited—though the first meeting took place in the library. When we finally complained enough, we became members of the committee, but were pointedly ignored as we spoke in favor of teaching a scaffolded research process rather than concentrating on product rubrics. Still, I inundate my principal with quality articles about the value of school libraries and ask for proof of “best practices” when decisions like those described above come along. But since there’s no one at the administrative level supporting the library program, the two of us at the high school level are lone voices and considered argumentative.

ALA and AASL leaders, movers, and shakers—take the message to annual conferences for administrators. Make them hear. Some will still make their decisions based on whatever voodoo data they claim to be using, but they can’t say they didn’t know otherwise.

Catherine M. Andronik
Teacher Librarian
Brien McMahon High School
Norwalk, CT

Bravo on Rebecca T. Miller’s editorial (“It’s Time to Step Up,” June 2013, p. 11). I have never understood why the American Library Association hasn’t done more to help keep full-time certified librarians in school libraries. I hope your prediction of tapping Barbara Stripling as a leader for this charge comes true. SLJ is exciting under your editorship. Thank you!

Diane K. Zentz
Library Media Specialist
Warren Central High School
Indianapolis, IN

I am writing in response to SLJ’s article, “ALA Promises Expanded School Library Advocacy in 2013-14,” Extra Helping, June 18, 2013). A group of concerned citizens has been working on revitalizing the school libraries in our community in Michigan, and this past year we were able to partner with our district library to bring a certified librarian back to the middle school. We have watched the students respond with enthusiasm. Teachers bring students to the library during class. We also open the library during lunch, and we had to cap how many students could come in because the response was overwhelming. Our librarian is very popular with students, staff, and parents, and he has become an invaluable team member at our school.

Our Title I school is a now a priority school in Michigan, so a thriving library is of utmost importance. Students need to be guided in their research efforts and they need to be exposed to a variety of resources, but even more importantly, they need a place with a large collection of titles where they can read for pleasure. We are on our way to providing these things for our students. Now, with ALA’s advocacy we can find more support.

Heather Albee-Scott
Parent Volunteer
Parkside Media Center Project
Jackson, MI

 Vocabulary development

Paige Jaeger (“On Common Core: Vulcanizing Vocabulary,” June 2013, p. 18) acknowledges the contribution of reading to vocabulary growth, but suggests that we need more; we need to require “challenging (and engaging) nonfiction,” “integrate academic vocabulary into our classes,” and add word games. We don’t need more. School librarians know how to help students develop a large vocabulary: provide a collection of engaging, understandable books, and help readers find the right books for them.

Studies show that when interesting and comprehensible books are available, young people read them, and that self-selected reading results in profound development of literacy, including vocabulary. Dedicated pleasure readers acquire thousands of words each year through reading, far more than they could from direct instruction programs or word games.

It is sometimes argued that voluntary reading may not include “the right stuff.” We know, however, that dedicated pleasure readers typically choose different kinds of reading and more complex reading as they mature (L. LaBrant, 1958, “An Evaluation of Free Reading.” Hunnicutt and Iverson Eds., Research in the Three R’s. Harper & Bros.). Students involved in reading eventually choose what experts have decided were “good books” (R. Schoonover, 1938, “The Case for Voluminous Reading.” English Journal 27, 114-118).

Also, even though different types of books are written in different styles, there is substantial overlap; anyone who reads deeply in any area will acquire a great deal of the academic style, enough to make a considerable amount of academic reading comprehensible. Students who have read extensively from series such as “Fear Street,” “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” and “The Hunger Games” will have a much easier time with a New York Times editorial than those who have not done so. Self-selected reading is the bridge between conversational and academic language.

Jaeger notes that “Within the CCSS framework, everyone is in the vocabulary business.” Librarians were in the vocabulary business long before the Common Core [Common Core State Standards], and have been the most important part of it. Young people get a lot of their reading material from libraries, and for those living in poverty the library is often their only source of books.

Stephen Krashen Professor Emeritus
Rossier School of Education University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA

From any conventional point of view, these are the centuries you can skip on the way to the Crusades, the High Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. But this new scholarship points to an era of lively intellectual exchange. Indeed, from my research on Sugar Changed the World (Clarion, 2010), it’s clear that Hindus, as well as the last of Athenian scholars (whose intellectual lineage leads back to Plato and Aristotle), were also part of this world.

I realize, of course, that however fascinating the recovery the academic reviewer calls “submerged worlds” may be to scholars and interested adults, this period will never make its way into K-12 curricula. Or could it? Just yesterday I read Jonathan Israel’s review of Anthony Pagden’s new book, The Enlightenment: And Why it Still Matters titled “How the Light Came In” (June 21 2013, Times Literary Supplement), which outlines a very different age of intellectual ferment, the Enlightenment. The reviewer is deeply versed in that era and in his essay he lists writers across Europe and North America and two centuries, who, in various camps, were part of that period. Then I came across a third review—that of Sarah Churchwell’s Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of ‘The Great Gatsby.”  Now Gatsby is a novel high school students do read, and Churchwell’s book seems to capture the wide intellectual world that fed F. Scott Fitzgerald as he wrote it—especially the work of the modernist writers T.S. Eliot and James Joyce.

The themes of these essays and the books they examine—ancient theological debate, centuries of humanist and Enlightenment ferment, and the cluster of early 20th-century experimental artists—are that the individuals, inventors, and ideas we offer to students as a sequence of greatest hits were really the expression of much larger moments of upheaval and exchange. What if we shifted our educational focus from “Key People and 5 Things You Need to Know” to an exploration of how such a hub of exchange forms, flourishes, and fades away? What if we said it doesn’t matter if you are teaching about the invention of bronze, the Renaissance, the birth of atomic and quantum theory, or digital innovation today, we want your students to examine and understand how a group of thinkers and creators comes together, argues, debates, steals, shares, competes, builds, and yields exponential leaps in thinking, creativity, and invention?

If growth was our theme, we could get past the  “Plato to NATO” goal of passing on names and dates and explore patterns of innovation. We might end a unit of study by asking students to look around and discover where nodes of creativity are taking shape today. How might they best train to be part of those lively places and spaces? Would that not be a useful approach to education? I’d love to think about how to make this kind of curriculum real.

In the 1840s, Elizabeth Blackwell decided to become a physician after an ailing female friend confided that she wished she could have been examined by a woman doctor. Tanya Lee Stone’s Who Says Women Can’t Be Doctors?: The Story of Elizabeth Blackwell (illustrated by Marjorie Priceman; Holt, 2013) reminds us that this was unheard of at the time. Shocking! Horrifying! What was she thinking? Blackwell applied to medical schools and was summarily turned down by 28 of them. She was accepted by her 29th choice—the medical school in Geneva, New York. When Blackwell arrived for classes, she learned that her acceptance had been voted on by the male students, who thought the whole thing was a joke.

But Blackwell toughed it out. Eventually, she graduated at the top of her class, but still had to land a job, which proved just as difficult as getting into medical school. As Stone says, “Being a doctor was definitely not an option [for women]. What do you think changed all that?” Blackwell did, of course. Although intended for elementary school readers, you can also share this simple book with high school students who will be shocked by the obstacles that Blackwell had to face. Also, tell them that today more than half of all medical students are women.

Women had to be plain, strong, and unmarried to serve as nurses in the Civil War, Kathleen Krull tells readers in Louisa May’s Battle: How the Civil War Led to Little Women (illustrated by Carlyn Beccia; Walker, 2013). Thirty-year-old Alcott met those requirements. However, up until that moment, she had not succeeded at fulfilling her own prophecy, written at age 15: “I shall be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t!” An abolitionist, Louisa traveled to Washington, DC, to work in a hospital, tending to the Union soldiers who suffered horrible wounds and disfigurements. The experience lasted only a few weeks, but it changed her life forever. Alcott caught typhoid in the filthy hospital and was sent home to recover.

The future novelist continued to reflect on that period of her life, writing about it in her letters and her journals. She realized she could use that experience in her fiction writing as well. The first volume of Alcott’s Little Women, one of the first novels set during the Civil War, was published in 1868 and became a huge hit. “By the time Louisa was thirty-six, it made all of her dreams come true!” And by the time she died, the woman who had lived in poverty for most of her life was making the modern equivalent of $2 million a year.

Clara Lemlich couldn’t even speak English, let alone write it, when she arrived in America from Ukraine. Michelle Markel’s Brave Girl: Clara and the Shirtwaist Makers’ Strike of 1909 (pictures by Melissa Sweet; HarperCollins, 2013) tells the ultimately joyful story about the tiny immigrant who attended school at night, earned meager wages, and worked under ghastly conditions in a garment factory. Determined to change it all, Lemlich led a huge walkout of women workers, inciting them in her native Yiddish. While her male colleagues were afraid to follow suit, the young champion urged a general strike, which eventually enabled many workers to unionize.

When discussing these biographies, I urge my booktalk audience to do what I do when something intrigues me: dig in, investigate, and find out more. I discovered that Blackwell wrote about the various men she met. Lemlich lived a long life as a union activist, and when she entered the Jewish Home for the Aged in the 1960s, she encouraged the workers to organize. Although these informational books were written for younger children, they will pique the interest of readers of all ages.

Such childhood delight and any attendant anxieties about friends and teachers are familiar enough. But my concern has shifted now that I am an adult, and one who feels a certain responsibility for the many children directly and indirectly involved in my life and work. The gap between the haves and the have-nots, which during my childhood sparked all kinds of unease, has grown wider and more deeply troubling.

Rising economic inequality and the persistent digital divide should have us all on high alert for the well-being of many of our children. In a recent Salon article, Andrew Leonard puts it in stark terms as he reflects on the rise of the Internet and rising economic inequality—and how they interrelate. “Twenty years after the Internet first started significantly transforming how we live, society has become more unequal and polarized,” he writes. (See, “The Internet’s greatest disruptive innovation: Inequality,” July 19, 2013)

“Today, the more skilled you are, the more you benefit from new technology. There is no question that for those with talent, drive and access to education, the connected society offers practically unlimited opportunity,” he writes. “But, if you are not so skilled, it’s a different story.” Leonard cites shifts in the job market brought by innovations in software, which continue to rattle the work world.

As the job landscape continues to shift, the mission of schools and libraries to address the gap intensifies, and the work of the key players, teachers and librarians, has never been more essential. Of course, they need support with infrastructure—like that provided by the recently proposed reforms to the E-rate program*—to level the playing field. And, as critically, we need enough teachers and librarians to go around, so we don’t keep exacerbating the other gaps with what’s been called an attention gap as class sizes grow and librarians get stretched thin. Our kids need all the engaged grown-ups they can get in their lives.

I know I am not alone as I fret. Luckily, librarians and other educators are full of new ideas, striving toward the common good for our children. Let’s give them what they need to do their work.

Rebecca T. Miller
Editor-in-Chief
rmiller@mediasourceinc.com

*This article has been amended to reflect that the updates to the E-rate program are not final. Comments from stakeholders, including librarians, are welcome and encouraged via the Electronic Comment Filing System before the FCC acts on Proceeding 13-184.

Librarians are often more comfortable working in the literacy classroom than manipulating mathematical data, but it may be statistics that prove to be our greatest ally. When the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) were rolled out two years ago, they were packaged as content standards, and six instructional pedagogical shifts were identified. Those shifts called for additional attention to vocabulary, nonfiction materials, text complexity, literacy across content areas, increased curriculum rigor from kindergarten through high school, and a focus on producing evidence (versus opinion). By drawing conclusions from data extrapolated from the English Language Arts (ELA) CCSS, librarians can build a strong case for a seventh shift: research.

In the world of statistics, occurrence, or frequency, is often used to interpret results. Viewing the CCSS standards through a statistical lens as a body of data and assessing importance based upon word frequency produces results that support that case. Start by assuming that the ELA standards represent the intentions of the authors of the CCSS, and the objectives, learning targets, and pedagogy that they are asking educators to embrace. Investigate the language of the standards and examine the number of times certain words appear; you’ll notice that the term “research” appears 132 times, exceeding the mention of “vocabulary” (79) and “nonfiction” (64), and comes in close to “evidence” (155) and “complexity” (196). The word “information” (244) is used more often than all five, but behind “reading” (388).

Clearly, research is an essential component of the learning process in the CCSS classroom. In most schools, it’s the librarian who teaches the higher-level skills that equip students to access, evaluate, and synthesize information—information that they use to speak and write with accuracy and authority when they produce evidence and draw conclusions for discussions, debates, or written assignments.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, half of this generation’s students will earn their living from the creation, dissemination, analysis, and communication of information. Under the CCSS, students begin exploring multiple points of view and presentations in the elementary years; by sixth grade, they are “researching to build and present knowledge” and by seventh grade are expected to conduct “short research projects to answer a question, drawing on several sources and generating additional related, focused questions for further research and investigation.” These benchmarks broaden and expand until 12th grade, by which time students should be “college and career ready.”

In addition, the pedagogy of evidence—text-based answers and the close reading of text—is part of the research process. Approximately half of the Common Core writing standards acknowledge that research is part of the writing process (see, Writing for Information Standards 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10). In the introduction to the ELA standards, under “Key Design Consideration” is this strong indication of that role: “To be ready for college, workforce training, and life in a technological society, students need the ability to gather, comprehend, evaluate, synthesize, and report on information and ideas, to conduct original research in order to answer questions or solve problems, and to analyze and create a high volume and extensive range of print and nonprint texts in media forms old and new….”

Perception data (the court of public opinion) can be as powerful as concrete data. It’s time for library professionals to craft a national message regarding research—in the same way that the arts have implanted themselves into the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) movement in education, turning it into STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, + Art/Design). Formally acknowledging a research shift underscores its function in “building and presenting knowledge” and adds weight to the librarian’s instrumental role within the CCSS.

The time has come to raise our megaphones and strut our stuff. This is an evidence-based claim. We have the data to support it.

Paige Jaeger (pjaeger@WSWHEBOBES.org) is coordinator for school library services, Washington Saratoga Warren Hamilton Essex BOCES, Saratoga Springs, NY.

Yesterday, my-about-to-be 13-year-old and I visited the Great Books Summer Program at its Amherst, MA, location. It made sense to bring Sasha because he was just back from three weeks at the John Hopkins Center for Talented Youth (CTY). I wanted his take on how the two programs were similar and different, and what I might tell you about them. I’ll get to that, but first here is the news as it relates directly to school librarians reading this column: these programs, and doubtless similar others that focus on music (Read*Teach*Play at the Ravinia Festival, DARTS at Tanglewood), and the other arts and sciences are exactly what middle and high school students need. They offer what schools straining under reduced budgets and months of test prep simply cannot provide. And they are not just for wealthy families, tiger parents, and super-motivated kids. Not at all.

Every high school has a college guidance counselor. But the school library should be the Summer Mind Camp clearing center—where brochures are gathered and websites curated, and from where, via an email blast, parents read about these opportunities. Every school library has a summer program to keep kids reading, which is great. But these camps do so much more—and every child deserves to hear about them, and see if there is one that is a fit for them.

At CTY, Sasha took a class that focused on great Supreme Court cases, starting coincidentally, the very same week that the Court handed down its key rulings on the Voting Rights Act and same-sex marriage. He loved the moot courts and debates. For the first time in his life he was, as he desperately texted me one morning, “surrounded by Republicans.” It was a great experience. But as much as he was stimulated by the classes and the discussions, he grew because the other students hailed from all over the United States, and indeed, the globe. Sasha met, and got to know, the world of people and ideas he will grow into.

CTY offers many courses, including some focused on math and computing, and perhaps, as a result, drew a real mix of boys and girls. Great Books focuses on literature: the plays, poems, essays, and novels that its designers consider, in the Mathew Arnold sense, “the best that has been thought and said.”  It appeared to me that there were more girls at Great Books, but the population was equally international. A boy who had arrived from China showed Sasha around, led him to the basketball courts during a break, and became an instant pal.

One key difference between the camps was that CTY— a very large, long-established program across many campuses—often uses middle and high school teachers as its instructors. This means that the best of them are quite skilled at stimulating discussion and directing campers to come up with their own answers, even if they are not necessarily experts. Great Books, by contrast, hires college professors and its three campuses—Amherst, MA, Stanford, CA, and, just recently, Oxford, England—provide students with an opportunity to meet, to interact with, and to learn from leaders in their fields. These are not full-on college lectures—there is give and take. But to my eyes, the liveliest conversations occurred when the campers broke into smaller groups and processed what they had heard and read that day.

Both programs understand kids—these are not cram courses. They build days around an interplay of art, sports, social time, and learning. And what each supplies—in its own way, by its own rules—is a humanistic education, that exposure to deep thought, rich literature, and probing minds, which we all too often see squeezed out of our K-12 schools. These camps give young people an intense exposure to everything the Common Core tries to achieve—with their international peers.

The programs are not an extra for the few. They are necessary mind medicine, soul fodder, for our kids. And school librarians can, should, and must be the ones to let students know that these opportunities exist. CTY does require certain test scores. Great Books needs only a recommendation from a qualified adult (such as a librarian or teacher). Both programs are expensive (not including travel), but both also have well-established financial aid and scholarship systems in place. When you think of the young people in your school, start by asking who would really benefit from attending this kind of mind camp—this amusement park of ideas and creativity and global connections. Make sure he or she, and his or her parents, know they exist. Don’t begin with the question of who can afford the experience.

The real question is: who can afford not to have this opportunity?*

*(We came upon Center For Talented Youth on our own; the Great Books program invited me to visit and paid for our overnight stay. I do not believe my views in this article were slanted by their blandishments, but in fairness you all should know that I was their guest.)

Photograph by Rebecca T. Miller

“The most exciting time for a kindergarten teacher is when a kid looks up and says, ‘Hey, I can read!’” This is my favorite line from a conversation between two educators at the daylong “Fostering Lifelong Learners” event held April 25 at the Cambridge (MA) Public Library. The speaker, Jim St. Claire, a 39-year veteran of the classroom, teaches at the Amigos School in Cambridge, a dual-language immersion program. His counterpart on the stage was Anne Mackay; with 13 years under her belt, she’s a lower school reading specialist at nearby Buckingham Browne & Nichols School. The two shared many insights to apply in working with babies and toddlers.

The day itself was structured to reflect the partnerships needed to give wee ones and their caregivers what they need to arrive at that “aha!” moment. It was organized by SLJ’s sister publication, The Horn Book, in collaboration with the Cambridge Public Library, and Reach Out and Read, a nonprofit that integrates early literacy training into pediatric examinations. The goal of the event, sponsored by Penguin, DK, Junior Library Guild, and Charlesbridge, was to foster early learning—be it in the library, the doctor’s office, at daycare, or at home.

Mackay, for her part, noted the need to build the ability to hear the sounds in words—calling that the “biggest predictor of reading later in life.” She also stressed teaching early print concepts, comprehension of plot, and the development of writing skills. “Encourage parents to get rid of markers,” she said. Instead, use chalk, on the blackboard or sidewalk, as it gives “a ton of feedback” and “really works fine motor skills.”

Technology, too, has its place. “Kids can get a sense of mastery if they know more than the teacher,” said St. Claire, “but we have to be aware of the kids who don’t have tech.” Mackay acknowledged that the digital age has changed many things, not all for the worse, adding, “there are lots of good apps.”

Meanwhile, we at SLJ were developing this special issue dedicated to early learning. I was excited to see so many of the themes of the Lifelong Learners event dovetail with what we were planning. From the essential tastiness of board books (“Built to Last,” p. 28) and the tactile pleasure of play at Brooklyn Public Library (“Read, Play, Grow,” p. 24) to the thoughtful development of apps at Sesame Workshop (“The Early Bird,” p. 18), may the ideas presented here inspire you toward achieving your own “aha” moment in your work with the youngest among us.

SLJ’s new look

Print readers will see a few changes in the magazine this month. They derived, in part, from our migration to the K4 cross-media publishing platform and WordPress content management system. This issue was produced via K4, which will enable us to be more nimble across print, e-newsletters, and the Web.

A migration like this inspires an evaluation of what we do, where, and why. For SLJ, it meant a reconsideration of aspects of the all-important reviews section. A small fix: book titles are enhanced to be more readable. A pragmatic but difficult decision: we will no longer produce the review index, which had appeared in each issue. We recognize the value of this index, especially to researchers, but now offer the BookVerdict database of reviews to subscribers as an alternate way to find SLJ reviews. A vast improvement: fiction and nonfiction now have their own sections, with more specific grade-level groupings.

Faced with creating new templates, our creative director, Mark Tuchman, seized the opportunity to update the look and feel of the magazine with new colors and tweaks to the layouts of everything from the contributors’ page to the stars page. We hope you approve.

Rebecca T. Miller
Editor-in-Chief
rmiller@mediasourceinc.com

Handling documents on your school site

No one loves having to download a document from a website in order to read it. Even the latest versions of Chrome and Firefox, which display PDFs within a browser, require a new window or tab in order to see a file. If you’re downloading a Word document, you have to leave your browser entirely.

To resolve this problem, use a service like Scribd or Box to embed and display important documents in one place on your site. First, upload your PDFs or Word documents to either service. Then, select the “embed” option to display the files on your site. If your document has multiple pages, visitors can scroll through them without having to leave the site. Embedded files are also printable by downloading and printing through the Scribd and Box document viewers. There’s an example of a Scribd. document display on my blog. Since Scribd and Box both use HTML5, they’re fully accessible on iPads.

Streamlining permissions forms

September means sending students home with a lot of paper forms that need parent signatures and then waiting—hoping?—for their return. You can bypass the black hole of student backpacks entirely by adding DropItToMe to your site. The service allows your site to receive files from visitors. Here’s how it works: after you’ve added a DropItToMe link to your Web page, visitors can click it to upload a file, which then goes to your Dropbox account. Dropbox gives you 2MB of free storage—more than adequate for collecting scanned documents from a classroom’s worth of parents. I used the DropItToMe and Dropbox combination to collect students’ work for a semester and never ran out of room. More free space, however, is available through Dropbox’s many promotions.

An alternative to adding DropItToMe to your site is to collect files directly in Dropbox through an email service. Send To Dropbox is a free tool that allows you to create a dedicated email address for your Dropbox account. This saves you the hassle of opening attachments within your personal email.

Save time with voice recognition messages

After you’ve been teaching all day, listening to voicemail messages can be a laborious task. Why not use voice-to-text tools so you can read the messages instead, getting to the main points faster? Google Voice or Speak Pipe widgets are handy to have on your website or blog. Both free services (available only in the U.S.) give site visitors the option of leaving a voicemail message, which is automatically transcribed to text. You can read them in your account’s inbox. If the text is unclear, the audio recording is also accessible.

Technical improvements aside, it’s also important to assess your site’s visual aesthetics, and adding some simple design elements can make a big difference. How effective is your choice of font style, size, and color? Your font style conveys a lot about your site, you, and your organization. For instance, Comic Sans in white on a dark green background evokes an association with chalkboards. Moreover, light fonts on dark backgrounds can strain the eye. And while Comic Sans or a chalkboard font might appeal to second graders, it could suggest a lack of seriousness to adults visiting your site. Save the fun fonts for short headings and articles that kids will read, and try using a standard Verdana or Georgia font for parent-oriented pages. Finally, is your home page cluttered looking? Consider putting only the most important information there and moving the rest to subpages.

Incorporating a few new elements into your Web presence this summer could pay dividends in the fall, with an improved site that looks cool and also saves you time.

A children’s librarian in a small public library, I announced a monthlong storytelling festival for school-age children. A parent of a third grader complained that the program involves fairy tales. I’m worried that the library director will ask me to pull the program. What should I do?

One parent shouldn’t be allowed to dictate a program. I suggest that you try to reason with her about the value of fairy tales. If she insists that her daughter isn’t to take part, then that is her choice. Let the director know that fairy tales are a large part of the oral tradition, and that no one else has complained. It should be treated in the same way as a book challenge. A formal complaint process solves the issue most of the time.

I’m an elementary school librarian and have once again been hit with a challenge to the “Junie B. Jones” series. The specific complaint is “disorderly conduct” and the grammar in the books. I’m tired of the challenges. I fear that I’m about to cave.

Do not cave! The purpose of a library is to serve all students. This doesn’t mean that everything in the collection satisfies every child or every parent. The way to solve the problem isn’t to remove the books, but to help children see that the “disorderly conduct” and the “bad grammar” define the character of Junie B. Jones—and contribute to the humor. Turn the discussion into an English lesson by asking them to correct the grammar. Children read these books to be entertained and don’t necessarily emulate the character. Trust their intelligence.

Students in a sophomore English class in my school were asked to write an original short story. One student used a lot of profanity in his. The teacher thinks the language is inappropriate and is afraid that she may get in trouble with the principal. She wants to fail the student. I told her that would be a mistake. What should we do?

If she didn’t specify that students weren’t allowed to use profanity in their stories, then she doesn’t have ground to stand on. Please advise the teacher to judge and grade the story on its merit, and not on issues of language. Are the stories for publication, a contest, to be read aloud in class? If not, then why is she afraid that the principal will question the assignment? She will create a larger problem if she reprimands the student.

I had no problems withThe Hunger Games in my middle school library until the movie was released. A parent who hasn’t read the book took her son to see the movie and she was bothered by the content. She called me because she doesn’t think the book should be in a middle school library. She added that neither the movie nor the book disturb, her son, and that makes her nervous. Help!

Tell her that the book is appropriate for middle school students, and that it was selected for the library based on reviews. Share the reviews with her and ask her to consider reading the book. Encourage her to discuss it with her son and ask him to reflect on its powerful themes. Sometimes conversation solves a disagreement. She needs to understand that she can guide what her son reads, but she doesn’t have the right to guide what other children read. Let the complaint go through a formal process if the mother isn’t satisfied.

I have seen a recent push by the American Library Association (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) to report any challenge to library materials. I’ve been afraid to let ALA know when there has been a challenge in my library. Why is reporting so important?

Don’t be afraid. The ALA OIF is there to help you. The information that is reported is kept confidential unless the person filing the complaint wishes for it to go public. ALA uses the data to help guide other libraries in the nation with similar cases. In addition, the data is used in determining the most challenged materials in a given year. It is especially helpful when the office knows the resolution to a case.

Final art inside!

When I first wrote to Sesame Workshop about the possibility of a Muppet-themed cover for School Library Journal, I had no idea if they would be agreeable. Fortunately, Jodi Lefkowitz, manager of corporate communications, got back to me quickly. We discussed possible imagery for the feature, and I was relieved to know that it was not going to be a problem getting photos, screenshots of apps, and images of Muppet characters to use in our article.

Then I broached the topic of the cover, and as an example, floated an idea that I had come up with shortly before the phone call. It was the idea that we ended up using: Big Bird as “The Early Bird,” which connected the themes of the issue—leaders in early learning—with one of Sesame Street‘s most widely recognized and beloved characters.

Jodi seemed positive about the idea, and so did the SLJ’s editors. A home run right off the bat? It’s not always this easy, but when you are starting off with Big Bird on the cover, you are starting out on third base! Sesame Workshop hooked us up with an illustrator, Louis Henry Mitchell, who is their associate design director of special projects. Imagine how happy we were to learn that, not only were we going to be able to feature Big Bird on our cover, it was going to be the real Big Bird.

What struck me about working with the staff from Sesame Workshop was how, when they talked about Big Bird and the other Muppets, it was not just business. They talked about the characters in a way that made it clear that the staff are the protectors and guardians of these beloved characters.

For example, when I sent over a crude thumbnail sketch to show them what I was originally envisioning, I sketched a lab coat on Big Bird. In pondering the “Early Bird” headline, I wondered if Big Bird should be cast in the role of the researcher. Sesame Workshop reminded me that Big Bird is only six years old—so it would make more sense if he was the one who was trying out the app.

In another conversation, I wondered if I could remove a suitcase that Ernie and Burt were holding in a promo photo of the characters, replacing it with a tablet that would display one of their apps. I was informed that the characters could never be seen as promoting products, not even their own.

There was an element of protectiveness of the Muppet characters—it’s clear that Sesame Workshop is committed to ensuring that the characters will always be portrayed with authenticity.

The white background of the cover art is ‘stripped out’ and Big Bird is then positioned in front of the logo.

Louis came back with a sketch that was straightforward but brilliant. By posing him in a sitting position it accentuated Big Bird’s size (he needs to sit to fit on the cover!) and also his childlike nature. He is on a tablet but instead of the Apple logo, you see a pineapple. And Big Bird was positioned to fit in perfectly among all of the cover elements—the logo, the cover lines, and even the inkjet mailing label box! SLJ’s editors and I quickly green-lighted the sketch.

Louis, who works both digitally and traditionally, said he relished the opportunity work old-school—on paper, with watercolor and colored pencil. We both felt it would be the right feel for this cover. The quick approval of the sketch bought him more time to work on his final art. And if you look closely at all of the detail in the feathers, you will see how much love and time went into this piece of original art, just further proof of how he, like all the staff at Sesame Workshop, care deeply about the Muppet characters.

Sesame Workshop is a group of smart, caring people doing exceptional work in the field of children’s education and entertainment. I was delighted for the opportunity to work with them.