Some of these kids have the weight of the world on their shoulders: Rochelle could be the first African-American female master in the history of chess; Alexis could be the first member of his family to go to college; and, at 11 years old, Justus is already a chess wunderkind—and that’s just a few of the remarkable players featured in the film.

School Library Journal caught up with first-time director Katie Dellamaggiore—who lives with her husband in Williamsburg, Brooklyn—for an illuminating chat about her directorial debut, chess, education, filmmaking, and making a difference.

Where did you get the idea to make Brooklyn Castle?
I found the story through an article I read in the New York Times in the spring of 2007. This article was about Shawn Martinez at Edward R. Murrow High School and the article was all about him and how they had the best chess team in the nation.

I also read The Kings of New York by Michael Weinreb. The hook for me was that I was from Brooklyn and I had no idea that we were known for public school chess teams. It didn’t seem like a likely situation. I was wrong of course. [laughs] One small chapter was about I.S. 318. So I talked to Michael and he was the one who suggested that it would be a good documentary: “You should check it out.” And so I did.

As soon as I met these kids, I knew that they would make for amazing characters in a documentary. The chess team was treated almost as athletes. It broke a lot of stereotypes. I was like, “Wow. This story is unexpected in so many ways.” I thought that if I found it unexpected and moving—and I’m from this neighborhood—others would, too.

When did you begin filming Brooklyn Castle? When did you wrap up?
We started shooting officially in April 2009. Then from there, we decided we would shoot for an entire school year, wrapping in June 2010. We spent two years editing on and off until it premiered in 2012.

Chess Champion Alexis Paredes at Home Photo Courtesy of PDA

Given how much time you were able to observe these kids, why do you think the chess players of I.S. 318 are so successful?
I think it’s a couple of things that make them so successful. A combination of really dedicated staff. [Assistant Principal] John [Galvin] and [chess teacher] Elizabeth [Spiegel] are really committed. Elizabeth gets them excited and John figures out ways to make it possible. The culture of the school in general is a really big part of it. The principal [Fred Rubino], who sadly passed away, really built a culture of activity.

I think kids at that age really respond to that. It gets them excited to go to school. And the kids themselves they work really hard. I mean, chess is not one of those skills you’re just born with. You have to put a lot of time and effort into it. These kids are motivated to do well. The parents in the film were so supportive of the kids and I think that is a big part of the equation. There really is no secret.  Elizabeth just has an unparalleled enthusiasm for chess and kids just really respond to teachers like that.

Do you have a favorite memory from filming?
There’s a lot of stuff that didn’t make the film. We traveled with the team a lot and so the kids are on field trips and there’s really funny shots with them doing silly stuff in the hallways, eating cereal from the box. And I remember being like, “Wow, I forgot that this was what it was like in junior high school.” These milestones, like we all had when we were younger.

What was your hardest or most difficult moment?
The most difficult part was editing the movie; we had so much footage. Like 400 hours of footage. It’s hard figuring out how to cut it down. It’s our first film and we thought it was ready much sooner than it actually was. We eventually found the movie, but that was the hardest part: figuring out a way to interweave it all so it’s cohesive.

Chess comes to signify something so much larger than a game in these kids’ lives. What do you think that is?
I think you can replace chess with any kind of positive enriching activity with any kid at that age. It’s an opportunity for these kids. For Patrick to over come his ADHD, for Rochelle to get a scholarship, for Alexis to go to college…it’s about opening up a kid’s world and that’s what chess did. But it doesn’t have to be chess as long as our public schools are giving kids opportunities like that where they can dream beyond their immediate world.

Do you keep in touch with the kids?
Certainly—especially in the last few months because of screenings. We’ve been seeing a lot of one another lately and will continue to. We’re in one another’s’ lives for the long run.

What kind of feedback have you received?
The immediate community here has really embraced the film. The school really embraced the film. We had some fundraisers for them; I think we’ve raised $35,000. That’s direct donations as a result of the film. Nationally, in terms of critical review, it’s crazy. On Rotten Tomatoes, it’s one of the top films in terms of critics; so that’s awesome. It’s not just a Brooklyn story. It’s just nice to know that the film is a universal story. That makes me really happy.

Reacting to the drastic budget cuts his school faces, Galvin says, “If you believe in public education, if you believe in kids, you’ve got to fight for it.” What can people who want to make sure that programs like the chess club at I.S. 318 continue do to help?
On a national level, there’s an organization like the Afterschool Alliance, they’re a partner of ours, and they’re fighting every day. On our website, we have action fights that they’ve shared with us. You can go to take action and see what the latest push is.

In your own community you can get involved as a parent in PTA and local councils.

It’s also about finding resources in other ways. If you’re an adult that has a skill, like chess, you can donate your time. You need to light the fire sometimes.

If people want to donate to the I.S. 318 chess team, you can do that through our website. Pobo has a petition that people can sign. The more we can get the word out about the film, I think the more it energizes people to see the value of programs like this. I think the movie is a great way for schools to be reminded of what their schools are really good at. It’s also nice for people to be reminded that there are really good things happening at public schools.

On February 5, Brooklyn Castle will be available on digital platforms such as iTunes and on-demand video. Communities can request screenings at their local theaters through Tugg.com. Libraries, nonprofits, and schools that are interested in showing the film can find more information on the website or by emailing info@brooklyncastle.com.

This year’s theme is LEAP: Leadership, Education, Achievement, Progress. Preconferences begin on April 12, and conference programs run through April 15. Exhibits are also available on April 13 and 14. Online registration is open until March 22.

Nashville Mayor Karl Dean came up with the idea for the partnership in 2008 as he looked for ways to leverage the city’s resources. “Through this partnership, I believe we can create world-class libraries in our schools,” said Dean said at the time. Through Limitless Libraries, NPL has helped modernize and expand school collections by weeding out outdated books and by using the city’s purchasing power to efficiently acquire new material. Additionally, students and teachers have near-instantaneous access to NPL’s entire collection, plus several local university collections. School-issued student IDs are used as city library cards.

Strong foundation for a bright future

Because of Limitless Libraries, all of Nashville’s high school collections are up to the state standard of nine items per student with audiovisual resources in every school and key purchases made, including ebooks and the online resource Rosen’s Teen Health and Wellness. Easier than ever before, students and teachers can access all of NPL’s databases. In addition, about 200 ereaders were purchased, so every school librarian can check them out to students. School librarians feel empowered by the added attention that their programs are receiving. Nashville students can now tap into the city’s collection of more than 1.5 million items, which can be delivered straight to their schools. During the 2011–2012 school year, more than 97,000 items were sent to Metro Nashville Schools by courier. Even more encouraging, 25,000 students registered as NPL’s patrons, and 15,000 of them were first-time public library users.

Nashville’s 74 elementary schools were added to the program this school year, making Limitless Libraries available in all 128 of the city’s traditional schools. There are plans to create hardy collections of audiovisual and English learner materials for elementary school students, and NPL recently teamed up with Follett to create a 2,500-item ebook collection. Additionally, the city is funding a longitudinal study of the program, in which the library will be working with education researcher Keith Curry Lance and his partners at RSL Research Group.

The beginning stages

From the get-go, a partnership seemed like a win-win situation. NPL already had an efficient, centralized collection development and procurement system, and librarians began identifying ways to work this system into high school libraries. It was clear that improvements to school libraries could easily be made by sharing resources and providing students with access to more learning materials.

Nashville Mayor Karl Dean

As a first step, a steering committee was convened, I was appointed to head up the project by Donna Nicely, who at the time was NPL’s director. We met with administrators from the public library, Nashville’s Metro Schools, and the mayor’s office. There’s no denying that the partnership demanded flexibility from every entity as each area would be required to do things differently. NPL and the school libraries were accustomed to operating in silos. But everyone involved agreed on the end goal: to provide students with the best possible library experience with ample selection choices.

Concerns in the implementation process included public librarians who worried about whether staffing levels could handle the additional responsibilities of such a program. At the same time, high school librarians expressed concerns over being “taken over.” With a clear vision, strong leadership, and a collaborative mindset, the groups worked together to overcome these obstacles. NPL has received additional staffing, and high school librarians see nothing but benefits from the partnership.

Next steps

As a next step, high school media specialists were recruited for a pilot program. During meetings hosted at local schools, school librarians had the chance to express needs and concerns. Everyone worked together to find solutions for many valid concerns, including how the school library collections would be modernized. As an example of that collaborative spirit, both NPL and school library personnel worked together to weed outdated books off shelves. They manually pulled the books, boxed up the discarded titles, and, together, scrubbed the empty shelves. In meetings attended by both school and public librarians, they agreed not a single book would be purchased unless everyone agreed.

To help with the process, Karen Lowe was hired as a consultant to help create guidelines for the weeding and purchasing decisions. Lowe is a veteran school library media coordinator, a college instructor, and the author of the definitive article on collection assessment, “Resource Alignment: Providing Curriculum Support in the School Library Media Center” (Knowledge Quest, November­–December 2001).

In the second semester of the 2009–2010 school year, we thoroughly assessed the school libraries’ collections. We tossed out antiquated or irrelevant titles and settled on what items to add. The city library also purchased 50 netbooks for the schools to lend to their students and teamed up with Ingram Digital to pilot 400 ebooks. Since the schools were now pooling their purchasing power, they were able to negotiate deeper discounts from vendors. There was also an increase in the number of vendors that schools did business with, and new arrangements were made for their orders to arrive processed and shelf-ready, which had never been done before. School librarians were thrilled that all that was required was to simply unpack the books and place them on the shelves.

Photo by Gary Layda

Through the roof

The first four months of the program were truly remarkable. All of the pilot’s initiatives were accomplished, and a strong relationship with the school librarians was established. By the end of the pilot program in May 2010, circulation at all high school libraries had improved. The most significant increase was at the Pearl-Cohn Entertainment Magnet High School, an inner-city school, where circulation improved by an astonishing 286 percent.

Weeded items, such as Little House on the Prairie and The Little Prince, were replaced with culturally relevant, engaging materials—many of which were in nonprint formats. Suddenly, school library collections became the hottest ticket in school. School librarians also discovered the power of audiobooks to attract students, especially reluctant readers and those who read below grade level. Audiobooks, especially Playaways, became huge hits, and school librarians have been quick to notice the difference they’ve made in many students’ lives. “One student comes in a couple of days a week with her Exceptional Ed teacher,” said a media specialist. “She does not like to read, but now she loves Playaways. She’s on her second book in three days.” And here’s what another high school librarian reported: “New seniors were faced with reading Metamorphosis. They were a bit behind. One borrowed the book on CD, the other [borrowed] the Playaway—and were they ever thankful.” Before the joint program got rolling, our school librarians never had the funds to purchase these types of resources.

School librarian Alison Maliszewski and seventh grader, Brandon Muñoz from Goodlettsville Middle School, Nashville, TN.

As a result of Limitless Libraries, many unexpected opportunities have emerged that are truly amazing. School libraries now regularly take part in public library programs, such as Teen Read Week and Food for Fines, an annual event in which patrons’ overdue fines are waived in exchange for jars of peanut butter, cans of soup, packages of pasta, and other food items that are donated to the local food bank. (Fines are reduced by one dollar for each item they contribute.) Plus, city and school librarians have started to talk more to one another, sharing valuable information about programming, reading lists, and upcoming events. In short, everyone has started to communicate more about how best to serve students.

When Lowe conducted a survey at the beginning of the first year, she found that half of the respondents were fearful or skeptical of the program. But in a similar survey conducted at the end of that school year, not a single librarian objected to it. In fact, at the end of that first year, these are the types of comments that were heard from media specialists: “NPL spent the mayor’s money so wisely and improved my collection. In fact, my circulation is up 170 percent over last year and school just started. I am thrilled.” And “I’ve been telling other librarians what a great experience it was participating in the NPL/MNPS pilot project…. [It’s] a win-win for everyone.”

Not surprisingly, librarians who have participated in the pilot program have become evangelists for Limitless Libraries, soothing the fears of their colleagues and assuring them that the school and public library are truly partners. When funding was expanded for the 2010–2011 school year to include all 16 of the city’s high schools, we immediately planned an in-service session with the additional school librarians. We devoted plenty of time to getting their input, listening to their concerns, and following through. By working in a collaborative way, we gained their trust. Students have responded favorably to the program, and circulation statistics are going through the roof.

The program has been improved every step of the way. Working with school administrators and city attorneys right before the 2010–2011 academic year began, a Memorandum of Understanding was drafted to allow schools to share student-directory and parental permission information with NPL. This allows Limitless Libraries to receive daily updates on student data to import into NPL’s Innovative Millennium system. As mentioned, students’ IDs now serve as their public library cards. City library staffers know if students have permission to use the courier service and place holds on public library items. The school courier visits the main library every day, and students with permission can pick up their public library materials at their school library. Home information is updated if it changes at school.

Kent Oliver, NPL’s director, fully embraces the vision of Limitless Libraries. “I look forward to continued growth and success of the program as we seek ways to further expand Limitless Libraries and make a literary impact on our youth.”

Limitless Libraries is truly groundbreaking, and it’s being modeled around the country. Any public school system and public library can replicate Limitless Libraries. As stated in the Limitless Library motto, which was penned by a Nashville eighth grader, “The future is in your hands, make it limitless.”

Tricia Racke Bengel is NPL’s associate director for collections and technology services. In March 2012, Library Journal (SLJ’s sister publication) named her a “Mover and Shaker” To find out more about Limitless Libraries, visit www.limitlesslibraries.org.

Marcus Lowry, teen librarian, Ramsey County (MN) Library and
Leslie Yoder, digital literacy and learning specialist, St. Paul Public Schools.
Photograph by Thomas Strand.

Last spring, when school librarian Leslie Yoder heard that young adult author Francisco X. Stork was available to visit Boys Totem Town, a residential program for incarcerated teens in St. Paul, MN, she pounced on the opportunity. Although Yoder lacked the necessary funds, she instantly knew who to turn to—her partners at Ramsey County Library.

For the last two years, Yoder, a digital literacy and learning specialist with St. Paul’s public schools, has teamed up with Ramsey’s teen librarians—and the outcome has been a win-win for both the librarians and the kids whom they serve.

Thanks to Ramsey teen librarian Marcus Lowry, who found the funds for Stork’s visit, the acclaimed writer spoke at a local high school and to dozens of Yoder’s enthusiastic students about his novel Behind the Eyes (Dutton, 2006), which deals with a reform school. “Our students don’t get to meet the people who write the books,” says Yoder.

When Lowry and fellow young adult librarian Amy Boese visit Boys Totem Town, they are weighed down with bags of books and eager to do what they do best—booktalking and spearheading a weeklong technology workshop. “It’s really energizing for us to go there,” says Boese, who also works with three other school districts. “They are always superpolite and have good questions.”

Although the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the American Library Association’s (ALA) Public Library Data Service Statistical Report don’t keep track of the number of joint-library projects, Yoder, Lowry, and Boese are among a small group of school and public librarians nationwide who regularly work together. Like many rewarding collaborative projects, theirs usually begin with a modest idea, in this case, offering booktalks to kids in a correctional facility. But behind every successful school and public library partnership, explains Lowry, there’s also a strong personal connection and a shared vision. “It almost always has to start with one personal connection,” he says. “It’s the one person that sees that mutual value—that we serve the same kids.”

Teaming up in Minnesota: Aaron Blechert, a media specialist at Irondale
High School, and Amy Boese, a teen librarian at Ramsey County Library,
with students in the school library.
Photograph by Thomas Strand.

It’s also sound fiscal sense for school and public libraries to pool their limited resources, says Jeffrey Roth, the New York Public Library’s vice president of strategy and finance. “We’re in an era that institutions need to look and see who they can partner with and strategically use each other’s assets,” he says.

That’s a strategy that the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) and Nashville Public Library (NPL) have worked to perfection. Although sharing public library collections with public schools is fairly unusual, that didn’t stop these two creative partners from thinking outside the box. During the 2011–2012 academic year, when Nashville’s budget-strapped schools were hurting for resources, the public library reached out a helping hand and loaned the city’s 54 middle schools and high schools 97,000 items—everything from books and DVDs to CDs and Playaways to entice reluctant readers and struggling English-language learners.

As a result of the impressive partnership, which is called Limitless Libraries, Stephanie Ham, NPL’s project coordinator, says the public library’s circulation stats have soared by an unprecedented 60 percent. And on the school side, MNPS’s lead librarian, Kathleen Bennett, couldn’t be more pleased. “This model is just fantastic and the benefits are great,” says Bennett. “What the kids get is wonderful open access to lots of resources.” (For more on Nashville’s Limitless Libraries, click on this link.)

The relationship between schools and public librarians is a critical one. Even before the recent recession, few school libraries could match the buying power of a large branch or a mid-size public library system. And during these troubled economic times, school librarians and their budgets are often among the first items scratched from public school budgets. That’s a compelling reason why Wisconsin’s School District of La Crosse and the La Crosse Public Library are exploring the possibility of sharing school and public library databases. “From a fiscal perspective, we’re starting to balance our resources so we are not duplicating online services,” says Vicki Lyons, the district’s director of technology and library services.

Still, successful school and public library partnerships can be a tough act to pull off, say many librarians and educators. Some of the typical roadblocks include a lack of time, vision, or resources; difficult personalities to deal with; and a scarcity of support from higher-ups. That may explain why less than one-third of school and public libraries coordinate book and other material purchases, according to School Library Journal’s first public library spending survey (see “It Takes Two,” May 2012, ow.ly/gekWY). When it comes to homework assignments, only nine percent of public libraries work directly with schools.

The emphasis on standardized testing can also be a barrier to working together, especially when kids are pulled out of the classroom to visit a public library. If the benefits of a joint effort aren’t obvious, says Rachelle Nocito, a content specialist for the School District of Philadelphia, many teachers and principals begin to worry that these activities will negatively impact test scores. “School districts are judged on our students’ achievement,” explains Nocito, whose district is piloting a program with the Free Library of Philadelphia. “It’s really important that when we step out of our building to do anything, its purpose definitely aligns with the reading program and social studies curriculum or science curriculum.”

But that doesn’t mean that school and public libraries should hesitate to work together. Susan Ballard, president of the American Association of School Librarians, a division of ALA, encourages school and public librarians to reach out to one another and other community groups. “No one can do anything on their own anymore; it’s simply not possible,” Ballard says.

At the moment, ALA’s Interdivisional Committee on School/Public Library Cooperation is working on ways to bring media centers and public libraries together on issues such as preventing “summer slide”—when kids lose many of the reading gains made during the school year—and implementing the Common Core standards. “If you’re not collaborating, why aren’t you collaborating?” Ballard asks. “The end result improves services for kids and makes them better researchers and lifelong learners.”

Students, of course, aren’t the only ones who benefit from a collaborative program. “Great partnerships let you reach out dynamically and work with a wide variety of partners within the school and public library,” says Marge Loch-Wouters, coordinator of youth services at La Crosse Public Library. She should know. Loch-Wouters has been building partnerships with local Wisconsin schools for more than two decades. “Great partnerships don’t put you in a box,” she says.

Buffy Hamilton doesn’t need to be convinced that joint-library ventures make a world of difference. Hamilton is so bullish on them that she recently left her post at Creekview High School, in Canton, GA, where she ran an award-winning library program, and joined the Cleveland Public Library’s (CPL) staff. School and public libraries “have much more in common with their visions and goals than we might initially think,” says Hamilton, who will be CPL’s liaison with Cleveland’s public schools. “We’re working on these parallel paths, and we can find a way to interact and pool our collective resources and talents to accomplish those goals.”

The following collaborative projects are a sampling of what’s happening around the country. Each of these dynamic programs has its own distinct approach, but they all have one thing in common: they’re making a genuine difference in kids’ lives and in the communities that they serve.

Denver, CO

In 2006, when residents of the Mile High City voted to raise the sales tax to support full-day kindergarten and early childhood education, the Denver Public Library (DPL) and the Denver Public Schools (DPS) knew it was the perfect time to extend their partnership, which, at the time, primarily placed library volunteers in the classroom to read to kids. With the help of a two-year, $476,000 Library Services and Technology Act grant, the two organizations banded together, in 2007, to teach children’s librarians, media specialists, and teachers about the latest advances in early childhood education. Children’s librarians who specialized in infant and toddler brain development shared their knowledge with teachers, and educators, in turn, brought public librarians up-to-date on the workings of the adolescent brain. “It was a new way to collaborate,” says David Sanger, DPS’s director of library services. “We formed professional learning communities, and those have still continued.”

Although the grant ended in 2009, the partnership is still going strong. These days DPL, DPS, and local nonprofit groups and agencies, such as Head Start, are working together on a number of projects for children from poor families. School and public librarians are also sharing their respective approaches to improving literacy and serving the city’s many English-language learners, who make up 34 percent of Denver’s K–12 students. Both groups are also discussing how best to share their resources, including, says Sanger, how to get their catalog databases to “talk to each other.”

Their efforts haven’t gone unnoticed. Denver’s 5 By 5 Project, which was created to support early childhood development, was inspired by these school and library partnerships, says Carol Edwards, DPL’s comanager of children’s and family services. The nonprofit organization, whose goal is to make sure that young kids have at least five cultural experiences by the time they start kindergarten, provides free admission to the city’s top cultural venues, such as the Denver Botanical Gardens and the Colorado Ballet, to nearly 3,000 Head Start and Early Head Start families. Plus, the library also offers free after-school camps for children of families in need. “It’s something that wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t been talking to each other,” says Edwards.

This month, DPL joined communities, such as Louisville and Boston, where one card serves as a student’s ID and library card. My Denver Card will also give kids free access to city parks and recreation services, and there are plans to expand its benefits to include the city’s transit system, says Jennifer Hoffman, manager of DPL’s books and borrowing. Hoffman says she anticipates issuing 30,000 cards. “We’re just trying to make it easy for a student to access us,” she says.

Portland, OR

To reach out to parents and students in east Portland, Multnomah County Library’s (MCL) Midland branch staff worked with educators at the Fir Ridge Campus (FRC), the David Douglas School District’s alternative high school. Their mission? To find teens who were eager to become library tour guides.

But these tours aren’t your average orientation sessions—especially when they’re conducted in Russian, Vietnamese, and Mandarin, the languages spoken in many of the young volunteers’ homes and neighborhoods. The aim of this innovative school-library project, says FRC’s librarian Deb Wheelbarger, is to attract parents who live in east Portland’s diverse and poor neighborhoods to bring their kids to the library and introduce them to its resources.

Student-guided tours are just one way that MCL has teamed up with its five area school districts. Another outreach program, Multnomah’s School Corps (staffed by Jackie Partch, Kate Houston, Peter Ford, and Gesse Stark, all of whom have MLIS degrees), offers local teachers curriculum support, which includes issuing them special library cards (so they can check out more books for longer periods of time), school visits to talk about research skills and library services, and “Buckets of Books,” which, as its name suggests, come brimming with books on commonly taught subjects, such as Oregon history, Pacific Northwest Native Americans, and insects and spiders, says Suzanne Myers Harold, MCL’s adult literacy coordinator. The library also brings visiting authors to local schools and works hard to bring students from the county’s high-poverty areas to theater productions and special events, including an awe-inspiring visit with the Portland Trailblazers, the city’s National Basketball Association team. “Through this collaboration with Multnomah County Library, we’re able to speak for them, and they for us,” says Wheelbarger. “I love the Multnomah County Library. It’s one of the most accessible libraries in the country.”

New York, NY

When the New York City Department of Education (NYDOE) realized there was a great way to work together with the New York Public Library (NYPL), Queens Library, and Brooklyn Public Library to get more learning resources into teachers’ and students’ hands, it couldn’t wait to get started—and MyLibraryNYC was soon launched.

Funded by a $5 million grant from Citigroup, the four-year pilot program, which gives students and teachers access to literally millions of additional materials, lets kids search their school and public libraries’ catalogs simultaneously from any computer that has Internet access. From the very start, the program, which began in 2011 with 84 schools and 50 NYPL branches, opted to take a potentially risky tact: to encourage kids to take advantage of their libraries, students would not be fined if they failed to return materials on time.

A recipe for disaster? Not at all, says NYPL’s Roth. In fact, almost 100 percent of the borrowed items have found their way back onto the library’s shelves. Best of all, students are scooping up more books. “The kids in the pilot were three times more likely to have a book checked out from their local library, and school library circulation essentially doubled,” says Roth. “The New York Public Library and the Department of Education already had a great relationship, but this has taken it to another level.”

Now in its second year, MyLibraryNYC reaches 250,000 students in 400 public schools, offering them access to 17 million books, videos, and recordings. And by 2015, the program hopes to include all 1.1 million of the city’s public school students, says Richard Hasenyager, NYDOE’s director of library services.

As part of the pilot program, NYPL will deliver books and other materials that meet the Common Core State Standards to participating schools. Groundwork is also being laid in all three public library systems to work more closely with school librarians and curriculum specialists so that their collections will support the state’s Common Core Standards.

NYPL estimates that MyLibraryNYC will cost $6 per student annually in direct and indirect costs, which include shipping the materials to schools and library branches. The public library systems pay for shipping and staff training, and the every school pays the roughly $800 annual fee charged by library resource vendor Follett for its Destiny catalog and BiblioCommons, which developed the catalog’s software and online interface. (Follett is giving those school libraries a $150 discount on Destiny.) School libraries that haven’t joined the pilot will pay $650, says Leanne Ellis, NYDOE’s coordinator of library services.

This year, the pilot added the Queens and Brooklyn public libraries and expanded to 207 school libraries that now serve 296 schools, says NYDOE. Although schools have to foot part of the bill, when you stop to consider what kids are getting in return—access to “the greatest books ever written by man,” says NYPL’s Roth—it’s a real deal.

Queens Library sees MyLibraryNYC as a launching pad to expand its librarians’ ongoing work with schools in the borough. “What can be done to help the kids, to support the teachers, to ensure kids have a strong start in reading and literacy and a place to go and their parents, too?” asks Bridget Quinn-Carey, the library’s chief operating officer. “Those are the wonderful things that libraries can do.”

Monterey High’s freshmen take advantage of computers in the Monterey Public Library teen zone as part of a joint venture between the school and library.
Photo courtesy of Monterey Public Library and Monterey High School.

Monterey, CA

To help its incoming freshman beef up their critical thinking skills and boost their tech know-how, the Monterey High School (MHS) turned to a familiar partner, the Monterey Public Library. The two teamed up to create a class called 21st Century Learning Skills. Aaron Sanders, the MHS history teacher who helped kick-start it, and Ben Gomberg, a librarian formerly with the Monterey Public Library, worked together to create the course’s project-oriented assignments, which have included creating websites that explore the coastal town’s history and comparing employment information that kids found on Craigslist with data provided by the U.S. Department of Labor. Supported by a $5,300 IMLS grant, their aim was to give 130 to 150 freshmen (out of a class of 1,100) the skills they needed to succeed in school and in life, says Sanders.

As part of the class, students made four separate visits to the public library (located just a block away), and Gomberg, in turn, made the same number of classroom visits, offering presentations on topics such as copyright and privacy, evaluating websites, and using library resources to prepare for college and careers.

How’s the new course working out? According to MHS’s principal, Marcie Plummer, students who took the class had fewer D’s and F’s, absences, and discipline issues than their nonparticipating peers. Roughly half of the kids in the class reported using the public library in their free time and about a third of them also used it to do schoolwork from other classes, says Gomberg.

Students in the pilot program have also learned how to be advocates for their own learning and how to evaluate their approaches to school so that they can improve their academic performance. “Personally as a teacher, I saw them having huge gains in that area,” Sanders says. “They were not afraid of having conversations with their teachers.”

Philadelphia, PA

How do you improve 146,090 kids’ information literacy and critical thinking skills? If you’re the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) and the Free Library of Philadelphia, you join hands to create a dynamic pilot program that pairs third-grade teachers with children’s librarians from nearby branches.

How does the program work? Six times during the last two months of the school year, instead of taking part in their school’s daily requirement of 90 minutes of reading, about 200 third graders take a short walk to their local public library, usually no more than a couple of blocks away. The purpose of the visits? To research the history of Philadelphia and their neighborhoods.

Upon returning to their classrooms, groups of three or four students dive headlong into the resources they discovered at the library and begin to create their own projects, says district content specialist Nocito. Although it’s impossible to predict what these inspired students are likely to cook up, one thing’s for sure—it’s always interesting.

Sarah Stippich, a children’s librarian at the Blanche A. Nixon/Cobbs Creek Library, remembers the day when the Free Library’s 25-foot-long, state-of-the art Techmobile visited Anderson Elementary School and its third graders were introduced to iPads. “They were digitally mapping our neighborhood,” says Stippich. “They were really into that, not only the technology part of that, but being able to look at their neighborhood and say, ‘Oh, that’s where I live.’”

Some classes combine their walks to the library with physical education, and their students strap on pedometers to count their footsteps, says Betsy Orsburn, the Free Library’s chief of the Office of Public Service Support.

Although it will take at least three years to gather enough data to evaluate the pilot, says Nocito, the initial assessments indicate that students are making connections between their schoolwork and library resources. Their teachers also reported developing moderately strong to strong informative partnerships with public librarians.

Nocito would like to improve on the instructional aspects of the pilot program. Ideally, she’d like to see a 10-week local history project that touches on different curriculum areas, such as science and language arts, and then follow up with an assessment to see if students’ gains continue on in fourth grade. “We’re under scrutiny,” she says. “Our students are going to be held accountable for their visits to the Free Library.”

The pilot program originally began in 2011, when the Free Library offered to help city schools that didn’t have a librarian or a school library, says Joe Benford, the Free Library’s chief of the Extensions Division. “It really is a way to try to cement library instruction and information literacy in the school district curriculum,” says Benford. Although more than 100 of Philadelphia’s 249 public schools have school libraries, only 46 schools have certified librarians. “The school librarians are almost nonexistent,” says Benford. “What we’re trying to do is prove this works and works as a model for the future. We just wanted to see if we could collaborate with the school district, and we have.”

Even though the pilot program appears to be working, there are limits to what it can accomplish. Stippich, who works with three third-grade teachers at Anderson Elementary School and with seven other schools and 12 child-care centers, says it’s impossible for her to offer everyone the level of service that she gives to those in the pilot program. “I can’t be the librarian for everyone,” she says. “This has just convinced me even more that they need more school librarians.”

Freelance writer Marta Murvosh is an aspiring librarian who often writes about libraries and education. You can find her at www.facebook.com/MartaMurvosh.

Messages requesting donations posted on the doors of John Jay High School in Brooklyn, currently an evacuation shelter for Hurricane Sandy victims.

School officials in New York and New Jersey grappled with how to get students and staff back to classrooms on Monday after the devastation of Hurricane Sandy. The storm left 57 New York City schools too structurally damaged to receive students, and eight are still in use as evacuation centers. In New Jersey, some schools were open, but a full picture of the extent of the damage was still hard to come by due to power outages, said Amy Rominiecki, president of the New Jersey Association of School Librarians (NJASL).

The widespread damage in New Jersey prompted organizers of the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) to cancel its annual meeting, slated for November 8-9 in Atlantic City, for the first time in 158 years. “Some reports are saying that schools won’t be able to move back into their buildings this year,” said Steve Baker, NJEA associate director for public relations. “Certainly the hardest-hit communities face a long and daunting process.” Baker added that though the conference will not be rescheduled, NJEA hopes to offer significant opportunities for professional development online.

Rominiecki sent an email last Thursday requesting damage reports from school librarians in the state. So far, she said, no one has responded, though schools are reopening. In the meantime, others have been reaching out to her, wanting to make contributions and help. “It’s wonderful that everyone wants to help out,” Rominiecki says, but she does not yet know who needs it.

Scenes from across New York City

New York City school librarians and staff returning to work faced a fluctuating situation in which officials scrambled to find alternate space for students whose schools are shuttered. Last week, fish from the Atlantic Ocean were swimming in the flooded cafeteria at the Lafayette Educational Campus, a large building housing five schools in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Librarian Frank Minaudo was told that the faculty and students would relocate to another facility. But when it emerged that nearby school buildings, including those in hard-hit Breezy Point, Queens, were in worse shape, plans changed. Now, Lafayette will host other displaced students.

“We’re keeping this school open with temporary heating units, even though it’s freezing,” Minaudo said on Monday, as the school principal and officials huddled nearby, figuring out how to partition the library into temporary classrooms for the extra students expected Wednesday (public schools are closed Tuesday due to the general election). Meanwhile, Minaudo, who had to turn students away from the library on Monday because of the principal’s meeting, mapped out his own triage teaching plan. “I’ll roll in with my laptop anywhere I can,” he said. “I’ll bring it to classrooms and do whatever I have to do.”

Manhattan’s PS 347, the American Sign Language and English Lower School in Manhattan, was also operating without heat or phone service, said Sara Paulson, coordinator of library services. A banner on the school’s web site yesterday morning advised children to dress warmly.

The storm also wreaked havoc on the early admissions college process, said Adam Stevens, a teacher and scholarship advisor at the Brooklyn Technical High School, currently being used as a shelter for nursing home patients and people with physical and psychological disabilities. Facing a November 1 deadline to file early application materials, many teachers could not file their student recommendations in time. Stevens said that the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) was working with colleges to grant extensions to students in the hurricane zone.

Students were to return to Brooklyn Tech on Monday, with evacuees still occupying other floors of the building. But those plans were cancelled and students were told to stay home. “The principal had a meeting with us in the library this morning and informed us that the school will try to reopen on Wednesday,” a school employee said on Monday. “These are special circumstances. The evacuees are from hospitals, and we can’t displace them.”

Farther south, PS 90 in Coney Island, Brooklyn, a coastal area pounded by storm, remains closed. Eileen Makoff, the school’s library media specialist, feared both for the students and for her small school library, which she labored to re-open last year. The school had gone for many years without a library facility.

Elsewhere in the city, schools prepared to absorb extra students. On Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Educational Campus building, which houses several schools in one structure, prepared for its role as a relocation site on Wednesday, said Campus Librarian Teresa Tartaglione. On Monday morning, it was still “business as usual” in the library, according to Tartaglione, who is also president of the New York City School Librarians’ Association (NYCSLA). But many students were still absent, in part because they received erroneous calls from the Department of Education telling them to stay home, she said.  On Wednesday, she planned to “have the library open, comfortable, and warm. I don’t know how many extra kids we’ll have.”

Voters who usually cast their ballots at John Jay were redirected to nearby P.S. 282 on Election Day.

With schools closed on Tuesday, Tartaglione planned to join other city librarians at the New York Department of Education Library Services Annual Fall Conference. Tartaglione expects a drop in attendance, and she said that some librarians have cancelled their presentations. “Aside from that, I think we are just trying to do the best we can and carry on,” she said.

The Queens facility of Bard High School Early College (BHSEC) was also getting ready to receive students, from a second BHSEC school located in lower Manhattan.“We are in preparedness mode,” said Queens BHSEC teacher Kim Nitchman. Several rooms in the library will be turned over to Manhattan faculty, and the Manhattan librarian will also relocate to Queens. Librarians from both campuses had been emailing over the weekend about technology usage, printing privileges, and, if needed, population limits in the library.

While schools were closed last week, teachers were busy, either reaching out to students at home or volunteering at evacuation centers. At Brooklyn Tech, athletic coaches and teachers called students who lived in evacuated zones to make sure they were all right, said Stevens, who supervises the debate team. Tartaglione said that staff at one school in the MLK campus building called every student on Friday.

At the John Jay High School building in Brooklyn, an evacuation center, Stuyvesant High School teacher Peter Brooks was volunteering, wearing a fluorescent vest and fielding whatever was thrown his way. Brooks said that there had been video rooms, concerts, and a magician for the younger children. A group of teachers from nearby PS 321, including music teacher Frank McGarry, showed up with musical instruments and performed twice. Therapy dogs were brought in as well, said Brooks.

First grade teacher Florence Delgado was hurrying to work at PS 226 in Bensonhurst on Friday morning. The school, like many others in the city that escaped damage, was open for teacher meetings. Staff had a lot of work to do to master the Core Curriculum, Delgado said.

At PS 321 on Friday morning, staff traded hurricane stories while snacking on bagels that had been sent over by the principal of another school.  As Principal Liz Phillips prepared to receive students on Monday, she noted the school’s history of raising funds for environmental or other causes, through student walkathons and other drives. This year, she expects many proceeds will go to Sandy victims.

On Staten Island, the Jerome Parker Campus was open on Monday, and librarian Patricia Sarles said the school was collecting donations for its own afflicted students. “Then we will do a drive for the rest of the island,” she said. “It’s helpful for students to feel like they can do something in the face of helplessness.”

Back in Bensonhurst, Minaudo and other teachers will carry on this week, even as their colleagues deal with tragedy. One staff member lost her home in Breezy Point. Another staff member’s neighbor was swept away by the tides on Staten Island.

“I think most people here are operating on adrenaline,” said Minaudo. “We won’t feel the full emotional impact until things return to normal. But as it was with 9/11, for many, it probably won’t ever be ‘normal’ again.”

In How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character (Houghton Mifflin, 2012), Paul Tough challenges the generally accepted notion that academic achievement rests primarily on the types of cognitive skills measured by IQ tests. Could it be that success is, in fact, more dependent upon non-cognitive skills or character traits such as grit, self-control, zest, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism, and curiosity? And if so, what does it mean for well-intentioned but perhaps flawed educational reform designed to lift children out of poverty by focusing on improving student performance on high-stakes math and reading tests?

Tough walks readers through research that falls squarely on the side of teaching kids to persevere, especially kids whose poor economic circumstances contribute to off-the-charts levels of stress, uncertainty, and disadvantage. (Just consider this statistic: “more than seven million American children [are] growing up in a family earning less than $11,000 a year.”) Along the way, the author introduces the administrators of the affluent Riverdale Country School, an independent day school in Riverdale, NY, and the KIPP Infinity Charter School,which serves kids in West Harlem. Both are using the research Tough so effectively summarizes to encourage growth in student achievement and behavior, albeit with different approaches. Readers also meet Elizabeth Spiegel, a chess teacher whose urban, public middle-school chess team has won national acclaim, and whose teaching methods get adolescent kids to think before they act, an important lesson for success in chess and in life.

Thanks to Paul Tough’s reporting, the research presented in How Children Succeed is finding its way to administrators, teachers, and parents, and the author graciously agreed to answer some questions about his book for SLJ’s Curriculum Connections.

A fundamental question has to do with how we define success. What are the most important indicators? 

I don’t attempt to give one single definition of success in this book. I want my own child to have a happy, meaningful, fulfilling, productive life, and that’s what I want for other children as well. That inevitably involves some markers of material success, like educational attainment and income, but it also involves more nuanced indicators of success, like satisfaction and fulfillment.

The most important fact about the definition of success used by the educators and scientists that I wrote about in How Children Succeed is that it is long-term. What these researchers are finding is that short-term academic success—high scores on standardized tests—often don’t correlate with long-term academic success, like college graduation.

If we want to improve outcomes, whether for individual kids or for the whole educational system, we need to focus more on long-term success and on the skills and traits and experiences that will help more students get there.

Schools have lots of experience measuring cognitive skills—which seems fairly simple when compared to measuring character strengths, such as grit and zest. Aren’t these skills open to subjective observation and interpretation? 

Yes, that’s a big challenge for anyone hoping to create a system to help develop these skills in children. There are some reliable tests, like Angela Duckworth’s grit test and traditional psychological measures of self-regulation. But when it comes to qualities like zest and curiosity, we mostly have subjective, observational ways to measure those qualities. The KIPP schools are trying to get more scientific about it, and they’re providing rubrics to help teachers identify and cultivate these character strengths. So far, though, that’s a work in progress.

That said, I think teachers (and parents) are pretty good at knowing which kids have more or less zest and curiosity, even if their opinions are necessarily subjective. KIPP uses a “character report card” while the Riverdale approach is more subtle.

Why are they using different methods and do you expect they’ll be equally effective?

I think they’re using different methods because of their different school cultures. KIPP schools have always been pretty experimental places, where administrators are constantly trying new ideas and strategies. So it was relatively easy for KIPP’s leaders to introduce the character report card (though it still took them a few years to develop it). The Riverdale community values tradition and stability, and so it may be more difficult for them to make big changes, even when the school leadership is behind them.

It’s hard to say which school’s methods will be more effective. I tend to think that KIPP’s approach will be more likely to contribute to KIPP’s ultimate goal, which is 75 percent college-graduation rates for their middle-school students—but that’s partly because KIPP’s ultimate goal for the program is clearer at this point than Riverdale’s.

I don’t think experienced teachers will have many “aha moments” when they read about the positive impact of strong parent/child relationships in early childhood. However, the idea that character traits are malleable in adolescence should be welcome news for middle-school teachers.

I agree. I had thought before I started my reporting that I would mostly be writing about early education, and I was surprised by how many of the programs I wound up reporting on were in middle and high school. But it’s striking how often these programs—most notably OneGoal—are able to help students make profound changes in their trajectories even late in high school. I think there’s some solid support for this idea in neuroscience. The prefrontal cortex, which controls many of the mental skills that we often describe as character strengths, remains malleable later in life than almost any other part of the brain, well into adolescence and even early adulthood.

If research confirms that present efforts to raise kids out of poverty by emphasizing cognitive skills are misguided, how can schools (and parents) move in a new direction, especially when the government is spending millions of dollars on new performance assessments, promised to be up and running for the 2014-15 school year?

I think it will take both a legislative shift and a cultural shift for us to put more emphasis on non-cognitive skills or character strengths in education. The emphasis on standardized tests in Race to the Top and in many state laws gives teachers and principals and school systems incentives to focus on the narrow band of cognitive skills that those tests measure, and to ignore other skills that are at least as important for long-term success. So we need to reform those laws in order to encourage teachers to teach all the skills that kids need to succeed.

But I don’t think this is simply a matter of legislative change. While we’re waiting for those reforms, I think individual teachers and parents and school leaders can do a lot to steer their children and their classrooms toward developing the character strengths they need to succeed.

A chapter of your book follows Elizabeth Spiegel who teaches and coaches the winning chess team at IS 318, a school in Williamsburg, Brooklyn with a majority of kids from low-income families. What makes those kids champions?

More than anything, I think it’s their hard work. They are an incredibly dedicated and determined group of young people, and they work harder to achieve their goals than any other group of middle-school students I’ve encountered. I think their dedication is rooted in the teaching strategies of Elizabeth Spiegel. She has found a powerful way to help them look honestly and straightforwardly at their own mistakes and failings and to learn from those mistakes. In the process, I think not only is she teaching them valuable chess knowledge, she is also helping them develop their character strengths. It’s the combination that makes the team so successful at chess tournaments.

Throughout the book, you report on specific young people who cope despite grueling poverty and seemingly unbeatable odds. And you write about a few who are hanging on by a thread. What’s the most important lesson we can learn from kids like Monisha, Mush, Keitha, and Kewauna?

I think their examples tell us two things. The first is that the environment that kids grow up in matters a tremendous amount in their outcomes. No children in this country should have to grow up with the kind of deprivation and stress and trauma that those four kids experienced in their early years. More than anything, we need to develop a better social-support system in this country for disadvantaged children and families, one that focuses on the early years but continues through adolescence.

The second is that young people can succeed even when they do grow up in very difficult circumstances. But they can’t do it alone. They need help from a committed adult, whether that’s a family member, a teacher, a mentor, or a coach. I think about the kind of dedicated, compassionate, focused support that Keitha got from her mentor, Lanita Reed. That was what made a difference for her.

Right now we have interventions in high-poverty neighborhoods that reach some of those kids some of the time. But that’s not nearly enough; we need a much more comprehensive program to help kids growing up in deep poverty, one that gives every child the tools and support they need to succeed.

The nationally-known principal also addresses the “elephant in the room” topic of why his school doesn’t have a librarian.

Just follow a high school student around for a day, says Chris Lehmann, founding principal of Philadelphia’s Science Leadership Academy (SLA), and you’ll see why most teens think “School stinks.” Lehmann, who delivered the October 27 keynote at School Library Journal’s 2012 Leadership Summit, isn’t surprised by these negative sentiments. He believes that outdated educational practices and decisions based on “reductive learning measurements,” or “cheap data,” are a failure of imagination and aren’t creating schools that engage learners.

The innovative educator rejects what he sees as an outdated “19th-century factory model” of school operations in favor of a new “citizenry model.” Lehmann challenged attendees to consider the number of times they’ve heard the mantra that teachers must strive to educate 21st-century workers. “Compliant workers aren’t going to solve the problems of the future; we need to educate people who can think, question, challenge, and solve,” he says.

So what makes SLA different, and what does the “citizenry model” look like?  It’s all about the student. “We learn best when it matters to us,” remarked Lehmann, who insists education must be student- and inquiry-driven, community-based, collaborative, and passionate. “High school is real life, not preparation for real life,” and students should be learning and exploring in ways that makes sense to them. “If we train kids to be workers, that’s what we’ll get. If we train them to be citizens, we’ll get workers and husbands and wives, parents and citizens.” Our purpose, he believes, should be to teach students “how to learn…how to live…to be better than they are today.”

Lehmann insists that kids need adults, so SLA teachers typically assume a mentor role, which means encouraging students to pursue what interests them. In lieu of report cards and benchmark tests, students create “artifacts of their learning.” The results? Engaging, personal projects that teachers could never have dreamed up or designed.

The educator worries that while “schools belong to our democratic tradition,” “public education is less valued now” than at any other moment in the past century. “The money we spend on kids is totally dependent on their parents’ incomes,” he stated, noting that [the urban] SLA receives approximately $6,000 per student compared to a nearby suburban community, which spends $22,000 per capita. Citing Philadelphia’s recent billion-dollar budget cut (from an initial budget of3.3 billion), Lehmann commented, “you don’t get there without a pretty high body count.”  SLA has no librarian, and students learn languages via a Rosetta Stone program.

His parting advice for the audience? “Reclaim schools from those who consider us managers.” “Unlearn to learn.” “Dream Bigger.” “Breakdown barriers.” “Include all stakeholders.” “Have fun.” And finally: “Be humbled by our task: we teach kids.”

As to the “elephant in the room,” Lehmann talks about the lack of a librarian at SLA at the beginning of his talk:

SLJ Summit 2012: Chris Lehmann keynote from School Library Journal on Vimeo.

Laurie O’Neil, family outreach social worker at James M. Quinn Elementary School, at the school’s Mix It Up Day last year.

A Christian group’s protests have spurred some schools to pull their involvement from next week’s Mix it Up at Lunch Day—an 11-year-old program meant to reduce prejudice among students that’s sponsored by the Teaching Tolerance project, part of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

But the American Family Association (AFA) doesn’t see the program that way. Instead, the Christian association has launched a campaign encouraging families to keep their children home on October 30, describing the event as a means to “establish the acceptance of homosexuality into public schools…” The AFA did not return calls requesting comment.

Schools that have participated in Mix It Up at Lunch Day for a decade have reported that the event is a great way for all students to break down social barriers—and even make new friends.

Deerfield (MA) Elementary School, which is holding their event on Friday October 26, has sixth graders lead table discussions over three different lunch periods.

“The students will say, ‘I already know everyone at this table,’ yet that’s not where they normally sit,” says Jeanine Heil, Deerfield’s principal. “This has allowed them to get to know more people at the school.”

The Teaching Tolerance project encourages schools to run Mix It Up at Lunch  on October 30— allowing for students to mingle and meet kids they may not normally share their sandwich with on a regular school day. There are materials online, plus links to model schools, like Deerfield, including other ideas on how to mark the event.

About 2,755 schools are registered to participate this October, more than each of the last two years. However, Maureen Costello, Teaching Tolerance’s director, says that about 5,000 or more usually hold an event, but don’t officially sign up online. Because of the AFA’s protests this year, 250 schools asked to be unregistered—but then another 400 added their names to the official list, Costello said.

“Half [that unregistered] indicated they were doing so under duress and had every intention of doing the program on another day or under another name,” she says.

Eileen Hunter-Sweeney says her school hasn’t heard a peep about concerns about next week’s Mix It Up at Lunch Day at Hackberry Hill Elementary in Arvada, CO. Instead, the kids are excited about the chance to sit with new students, as they have every year since Teaching Tolerance launched the event.

“It’s an easy way to meet someone they want to sit with,” says Hunter-Sweeney, the school’s social worker. “They don’t have to have the nerve to walk across the cafeteria and meet someone new. They’re expected to.”

Students at the Mix It Up event last year.

They’re not necessarily expected to wear big purple hats at James M. Quinn Elementary School in Dartmouth, MA. But that’s what Laurie O’Neil, the school’s family outreach social worker will don at next Tuesday’s lunch, where teachers, students and staff are encouraged to mix up their clothing as well. “The kids love it,” says O’Neil.

At Lynn (MA) English High School, students are invited to two Mix It Up dinners each year—one in the spring and one in October, held earlier this week, where about 150 students paid $3 each, enjoyed a catered dinner of pasta and salad, played Pictionary, and were assigned tables by picking a random number.

“The goal is to work with kids within the school to improve school climate and make everyone feel welcome and accepted,” says Ginny Keenan, peer mediation and mentoring coordinator and Friends of Rachel Club advisor, which sponsors the event.

And that, ultimately, is the goal organizers hope to reach: students seeing each other for the individuals they are—and accepting them into the school community.

“We hope the schools use it as an approach to build a positive climate for students and respect for each other,” says Costello. “We don’t want students to relate to stereotypes but to each other.”

Las Ramblas in Barcelona, Spain. Photo by Oh-Barcelona.com

I’m writing this piece from Barcelona, an ocean away from American public education and our Common Core (CC) standards. And yet all around me, I see connections rather than differences.

Barcelona was built as a Roman walled city, and added more walls down through much of the 1800s. Throughout those 1,800 years, walls defined and protected the city. But in the late-19th century, the walls were torn down and a new city began to spring up—a city where the fortunes that were made in the textile mills sponsored artists such as Antoni Gaudi, whose buildings are a marvel to this very day. And now Barcelona is almost too open to the world: it’s become the fourth most-visited city in Europe, trailing only London, Rome, and Paris. Being here in August, when many locals leave on vacation, exaggerates the presence of tourists, but walking down Las Ramblas—the vast, outdoor pedestrian mall—you’re mobbed by everyone from everywhere—and that’s only part of the internationalization that’s happened.

What was it—40 years ago?—when the formerly Italian, Greek, and Jewish fruit stands and delis in New York City were all run by Koreans? Then 20 years ago, the Koreans began to hire Mexicans, and now some Indians have joined them. Here in Barcelona, these businesses are run by South Asians—New York is the world and the world is New York. Opening out to the world has lead Barcelona in two opposite and familiar directions. Those who could join the global bandwagon did very well for a while, less so now that Spain is struggling economically, but they’re still doing OK. Those who were less fortunate were left behind and they’ve become poorer and poorer. The city veers between being open-minded on the one hand, and inward-turning and Catalan nationalist on the other.

Thinking of how to prepare for the future, the city has decided to focus K–12 education on training and inspiring students to become innovators, creating with an eye on the whole world. In other words, Barcelona faces the same challenges and offers the same types of solutions we do. We, too, are wide open to the world, with a gap between those for whom this is an opportunity and those for whom it is a growing threat. We, too, see both intermarriage and narrow nationalism growing.

We, too, are trying to prepare our young people to become problem solvers—that’s the essence of CC. My vision is that our students should be working digitally with their peers here in Spain—and also with those in Amsterdam, Paris, London, Delhi, Tel Aviv, and beyond. If we face the same international moment, let’s meet it as an international educational opportunity. Breaking down the walls of our schools may bring us our own new global Gaudi.

Illustration by David Flaherty

Principals value their librarians. They also want them to be more visible leaders.

Those are just two of the interesting findings from a recent survey of 102 media specialists and 67 principals. In fact, 90 percent of the administrators that we surveyed think we have a positive impact in schools—and a large number also feel that our jobs are important. That’s great news, considering only 65 percent of librarians in the study thought their bosses would recognize the valuable role we play.

Tech respect

When asked about our tech contributions, not only did 90 percent of principals say that we encourage its use, they also ranked dealing with technology as one of the top 10 important tasks that we perform. In fact, our bosses highlighted three technology-related activities—sharing our tech expertise with students and teachers, offering tech leadership, and providing tech equipment—as being among our most important job functions.

“The evolution of the ‘library’ into the ‘media/technology’ center is a reality,” says one administrator. “The librarian needs to be current on new and emerging technologies, and assist others in their use.” Another explained that our “teachers are not technology literate, but the librarian is doing her best to change that problem.”

One principal even went as far as to say that technology and the library go hand-in-hand. “As the information landscape continues to evolve, the librarian is the rudder guiding the school toward the new or unknown, while at the same time melding ethical use and appropriate application in the school environment as well as life outside of school.”

Not surprisingly, we’re keenly aware of the crucial role that technology plays in our professional lives—and we like being called the “tech expert.” Some 95 percent of media specialists surveyed agree, or strongly agree, that technology is an essential component of our work, with one librarian saying it was “vital” to her library and another saying she pushes it all the time.

“Technology is my baby! I infuse it into each lesson,” says one respondent who’s also part of her district’s tech team and offers tech training to her colleagues in newsletters and emails. “I present with it and teach it. It hooks the students and the staff.”

Every librarian who responded to the survey said they embrace and encourage technology in their schools, with many adding that they’re one of the few people in the building who are up to date on the latest and greatest technology available, in addition to having in-depth knowledge of web design, prezis, wikis, blogs, and the hottest educational apps.

While some media specialists—especially the veterans—admit to fearing technology at times, they say they still push themselves to help teachers see its value and how it’ll make learning easier in the long run. Several, for example, mentioned getting creative with their Kindle Fires and iPads to teach students about online resources. The only negative comments were about funding—or more specifically, the lack of it—for keeping up with the fast-paced tech evolution.

What are other areas of our jobs that scored high with our bosses? The bulk, 93 percent, strongly agree that we’re helpful in “reinforcing concepts learned in the classroom” and that we assist teachers by making resources available. Plus, 90 percent of administrators think our rooms are inviting. Meanwhile, 90 percent also feel our professional development efforts with teaching colleagues are effective. This is an area of opportunity for librarians: as more than half of librarians surveyed report working with teachers on a one-on-one basis, and express a desire to do more professional development and collaboration in the future.

The big disconnect

Of course, there are areas where school librarians and their principals simply don’t see eye to eye. One that stands out has to do with the promotion of recreational reading. A whopping 98.4 percent of librarians agree—and 81.3 percent strongly agree—that they encourage reading for pleasure, which, according to researcher Stephen Krashen, “is the major source of our reading competence, our vocabulary, and our ability to handle complex grammatical constructions.” Simply put, those who read more show superior literacy development, and as Krashen explains, literacy and language growth are “clearly attributable to free reading.”

Yet only 48.8 percent of principals strongly agree that the librarian encourages recreational reading. It’s quite possible that the question was misunderstood, or that of more concern, principals just don’t understand that it’s a significant—and important—part of what we do each day.

This may help explain another disparity we uncovered: when asked to list the activities that librarians perform daily, media specialists provided a list that exceeded 100 tasks. On the other hand, principals listed 20 items, which, when we eliminated redundancies, were narrowed down to a mere 10. The good news is that both pretty much agree that the top tasks performed by librarians include helping students to access books and information, teaching students and teachers research and tech skills, and collaborating with teachers.

Looking for leaders

So why do so many librarians complain about not feeling the love? Our survey found that some of the negative stereotypes that we’ve been fighting all these years still persist. A lot of principals continue to view librarians as unfriendly shushers who are more concerned with keeping their books in order than encouraging kids to read. One administrator said that courtesy and customer service were important but lacking in his librarian, with another adding that a smile wouldn’t hurt. And when asked to identify the visible leaders in their schools, most of our bosses simply don’t think of us. Only 24.4 percent of administrators view media specialists as visible leaders. And the sad news is that we agree. When posed the same question, only 28 percent of school librarians say they strongly see themselves in a leadership role.

A very likely explanation is that school librarians don’t feel comfortable labeling themselves as leaders—but it doesn’t mean they’re not acting like ones, says Marcia Mardis, associate director of the Partnerships Advancing Library Media (PALM) Center at Florida State University. “Leaders are as leaders do.”

Mardis makes an interesting point. As our survey shows, media specialists perform dozens of tasks each day, but they don’t necessarily feel the need to stand up and shout about it to the world. Some feel that librarians would have taken district-level or managerial jobs if they wanted to be identified as leaders in the traditional sense of the word.

“Labeling yourself a leader can require a lot of chutzpah in an environment that very clearly labels its leaders as principals, assistant principals, and curriculum directors,” explains Mardis. “To stand in the face of that formal recognition and say, ‘I am a leader, too—even if you don’t call me one’ is a professional risk. It’s much less professional risk to act like a leader than it is to call yourself a leader.”

We’re trying to overcome this exact problem with our MLS students at Sam Houston State University, where I train teachers to become school librarians. When asked to rate themselves on key areas that are important to the role of a media specialist, my students consistently rank themselves low in leadership potential and high in the areas of literature expertise, tech ability, library administration, and teaching. Since these future librarians don’t seem to know how to lead—or don’t have a natural affinity for it—our faculty has developed several assignments to teach them how to lead through collaboration, by providing training, teaching technology, and by encouraging them to be the go-to person in the school and community. We’re even teaming up with our school administration department to offer a Ph.D. program in school administration, with an emphasis on library science. By training our students to lead before they enter the media center, we hope these future school librarians will consider leadership and advocacy as important as ordering books and teaching kids how to do research.

Indeed, formidable obstacles to leadership exist in the real world. While many librarians who were surveyed say that they feel like visible leaders with their students and want to be leaders outside the library, it’s a different story when it comes to standing out among their teaching peers. The roadblocks range from fear of rocking the boat and being spread too thinly among different schools to jealousy from classroom teachers and a lack of support from administrators.

“I have been an advocate in my district, which has earned me a few gray hairs due to the lack of interest,” says one respondent. Another says she’s never invited to faculty meetings, despite raising repeated requests to her administrator. “It’s hard to be a visible anything—let alone leader—when you aren’t even seen.”

Lisa Hunt, a media specialist at Apple Creek Elementary in Moore, OK, concurs. “The first year my principal arrived, she rarely came into the library. It soon became clear that she not only thought I wasn’t leadership material, she wanted to ignore my existence.”

One high school librarian in rural Alabama says she wasn’t even allowed to accept an invitation from a student to a banquet honoring academic excellence among the top 10 seniors at her school because “my principal said, ‘No, she’s not a teacher.’”

Lorraine Calabrese, an elementary school librarian with the Northgate School District in Pittsburgh, PA, inherited both the legacy of a former librarian who possessed few leadership qualities and the difficulty of splitting her time between two buildings. “I have two schools, two principals, often with very different styles of management,” she says. “I have my hands tied somewhat by teaching seven out of nine periods a day. Students are dropped at the door, [and I’m] lucky if I see the teacher. When technology came in, I grabbed the chance to be a leader and was… until they hired a technology teacher.”

Taking the lead

Although most administrators don’t see us often taking the lead, about 50 percent of respondents say they’re receptive—and in favor—of the idea. And while some media specialists say they’re waiting for an invitation to lead from their principals, a majority of administrators say librarians should take the initiative themselves.

“This position is the best of both worlds,” wrote one principal. “Students work in project-based learning environments without the threat of failure in the library, and actually, failure in the library is incentive alone to continue learning.” Meanwhile, another administrator said, “An effective librarian could be as important as an effective principal, given his/her ability to impact teaching and learning in the school.”

At the same time, almost all librarians agree that achieving success without their principal’s backing is impossible. “It is vital,” says Gerri Ellner Krim, a media specialist at Brooklyn Collegiate in New York and a 2007 winner of the School Library Journal/Thomson Gale Giant Step Award for the most improved library.

What advice do librarians who consider themselves leaders have to offer? Advocacy ranks at the top of the list for all of them—and it can come with huge payoffs. Alice Yucht, a retired school librarian and the creator of the widely read Alice in Infoland blog, describes the need to be “assertively courteous” by offering timely and useful resources to teachers and administrators. But she cautions against complaining. “Always be positive, even if you have to fake it,” she says, adding that it’s important to promote the library, not yourself—and to know the difference between promotion and advocacy. “You cannot self-advocate. You need to create satisfied customers and users who will then advocate for the library.”

Learning the language of administrators and even dressing like them was key for Rose Luna, a librarian at New York’s Freeport High School. “When you wear a suit, people perceive you a certain way. If you’re wearing a holiday sweater with a pumpkin on it, you aren’t going to be perceived as a leader or as a part of the leadership tribe.”

After giving numerous presentations and workshops to teachers, parents, and other community members—sometimes on weekends and after school—Margaux DelGuidice, a librarian at Garden City High School in New York, says she and her co-librarian were asked by their superintendent to present at a Superintendent’s Cabinet Meeting to administrators from across Long Island. The topic was a librarian’s dream: the importance of a research curriculum and the link between school librarians, research skills, and the Common Core Standards.

For Pamela Jackson, a teacher-librarian at East Wake High School in Wendell, NC, social media played a big role in her success. “I’ve Twittered with educators globally for over three years, and this has led to exponential professional growth,” she says. “I’ve participated in numerous free online webinars, boot camps, edchats, virtual cafes, classroom 2.0, and unconferences. I’ve attended board meetings, advocating for librarians, information literacy, and student success; and I’ve shared with business leaders what librarians do.”

The best advice that Maureen Schlosser offers is to attend every meeting possible, especially the ones at grade level. “Bring to every meeting some little tidbit from the library, whether it’s a great book that will support a lesson, or a website that will help teachers or administrators in some way,” says the librarian at Colchester Elementary School in Connecticut. “When presenting the tidbits, think of it as a quick commercial, and you are the star of the commercial, and the cameras are rolling. If the audience sees you excited about whatever it is you are bringing to the table, they can’t help but be excited, too. Especially when they see that you truly want to help support what they work so hard at doing every day. Who wouldn’t appreciate help?”

Schlosser also says to stay current. “Read all of the current information out there about what is new and relevant. Go to any classes or workshops that will not only help you in the library, but also teachers in the classroom.”

She routinely follows “revolutionary” librarians such as Joyce Valenza, Michelle Luhtala, Buffy Hamilton, and Gweneth Jones on Twitter to see what they’re doing.

“With the Common Core being implemented next year, you can’t help but see library media skills written all over those standards,” says Schlosser, explaining that her goal last year was to team up with her school’s ed-tech teachers on lessons using the Common Core Crosswalk and the Inquiry Model developed by Barbara Stripling, the former head of school libraries for the New York City Department of Education, and to share the lessons with everyone. “Because of our efforts, our administrators are asking all social studies teachers to work with school librarians on research projects.”

Nicole Knott, a media specialist at Connecticut’s Watertown High School, sums it up best. “If you promote the image of the media center as the hub of the school—for staff, students, and the community at large—it will inevitably become such, and the person in charge of such a vital place is bound to be sought out as a leader.”

President Obama tapes the weekly address in the State Dining Room of the White House. Photo: White House Photo: Chuck Kennedy.

President Obama’s weekly radio and Internet address on Saturday focused on the critical role that education plays in our country’s future—and the need for Congress to pass his proposed jobs bill to help states prevent teacher layoffs and rehire them.  But he made no mention of school librarians.

Obama said several thousand educators would not be returning to school in September. And due to budget cuts at the state and local level, some 300,000 education jobs have been lost since the official end of the recession in 2009. As a result, the student-to-teacher ratio has increased by 4.6 percent from 2008 to 2010 and that number is expected to grow.

“Think about what that means for our country,” Obama said. “At a time when the rest of the world is racing to out-educate America; these cuts force our kids into crowded classrooms, cancel programs for preschoolers and kindergarteners, and shorten the school week and the school year.”

While Obama made no mention of school librarians in his address, a White House report on this subject, “Investing in Our Future: Returning Teachers to the Classroom,” references several newspaper articles that illustrate the effect of education cuts on libraries as well.

In Sacramento, CA, for example, the Sacramento Bee reported that this upcoming year, area students returning to school should expect another year of large class sizes, fewer teachers, and reduced resources, as a result of four consecutive years of state budget cuts. In addition to the nearly 650 teachers in Sacramento County who received final termination notices in May, “district’s students can expect larger class sizes in kindergarten through third grade, fewer arts and music programs, and fewer assistant principals and librarians.”

In Cleveland, OH, the school board voted in April to trim about a sixth of its teaching staff in the upcoming school year because of budget troubles and a falling number of students, says Cleveland Plain Dealer. The district plans to lay off more than 500 teachers at the end of this school year, as well as shorten the school day through eighth grade by 50 minutes. It will also “cut the number of music, art, library, and gym classes for those students as part of the shuffling of staff to handle the layoffs.”

It’s no surprise Obama left out libraries in his address. In May 2011, the Department of Education eliminated funding for the Improving Literacy Through School Libraries program, the only federal program that was solely devoted to school libraries. Senator Jack Reed (D-RI),with strong grassroots support from educators, parents, and students, managed to replace some of that money late last year by securing $28.6 million in federal funds for school libraries and literacy programs for FY 2012 in the Omnibus Appropriations Bill. President Obama signed it into law on December 23, 2011.

“We would like the President, along with all administration officials and members of Congress, to include school librarians when they are speaking about educational professionals at any type of school,” says Jeff Kratz, the American Library Association’s assistant director of the Office of Government Relations.

Federal cuts to school libraries trickle down to school districts nationwide, says the American Library Association. As a result, California has been one of the hardest hit, where the number of certified teacher-librarians has dropped to 895 this school year. The Los Angeles Unified School District also laid off dozens of its library staff, interviewing them for a chance to be reassigned to a classroom.

The Investing in Our Future report offers the President another chance to push a year-old jobs plan he proposed last September, which provides money for states to keep teachers, police officers, and firefighters employed—and comes during an election year.

Cutting teachers is “the opposite of what we should be doing as a country,” Obama said in his address. “States should be making education a priority in their budgets, even in tough fiscal times. And Congress should be willing to help out—because this affects all of us.”

National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel responded to Obama’s address, saying, “we applaud him for that [because] Gov. Romney has made it clear that he doesn’t believe in the impact of keeping class sizes small, despite evidence to the contrary and despite what parents across this country know.”

Van Roekel went on to say that class size is a “critical piece of the school improvement puzzle and we cannot ignore the positive effect that personalized learning has for kids.”

“This report reminds us that we have a choice to make in November between two visions for America. President Obama’s, in which all students deserve a great education; and Gov. Romney’s, in which kids get the best education their parents can afford,” Van Roekel said.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten urged Congress to pass the American Jobs Act.  “These cuts come at a time when we should be increasing our commitment to children and to the public schools that educate 90 percent of them,” he said. “With poverty spiking and student enrollment increasing, it’s more important than ever that every student in our charge is prepared for life, college and career.”

Last spring the children’s book community lost several beloved authors and illustrators, including the hugely talented Leo Dillon, Jean Craighead George, Ellen Levine, and Maurice Sendak. In honor of their memory and their many accomplishments, TeachingBooks.net is offering video and audio recordings of these creative artists whose work enriched the lives of so many people.

In alphabetical order:

Leo Dillon (March 2, 1933 – May 26, 2012)

For nearly 50 years, Leo Dillon collaborated with his wife Diane, creating books for children. In this exclusive video of the artists in their Brooklyn, New York, studio, Dillon muses on making “life an art” and the “spiritualist quality” of the stories the couple illustrated.

Jean Craighead George (July 2, 1919 – May 15, 2012)

Jean Craighead George, an enthusiastic naturalist, had an opportunity to study wolves on a scientific expedition to the Arctic. In this audio presentation, the author introduces and reads from her Newbery winner, Julie of the Wolves (Harper and Row,1972), a book that incorporated her observations of these animals.

Ellen Levine (March 9, 1939 – May 26, 2012)

Ellen Levine didn’t mind being called “divine.” In this TeachingBooks.net Author Name Pronunciation the author shares the history of her family name and tells how an incorrect pronunciation led to a flattering description.

Maurice Sendak (June 10, 1928 – May 8, 2012)

Maurice Sendak was witty and bold. In this audio presentation, the author/artist narrates the opening of Pincus and the Pig: A Klezmer Tale (Tzadik, 2004)–a version of Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. Eight illustrations created by Sendak for this distinctive audio CD are also available for viewing.

Nick Glass and Carin Bringelson of TeachingBooks.net enjoy multimedia resources that connect us to books–and favorite writers and illustrators. Share your thoughts on this column by emailing nick@TeachingBooks.net.

Overall, 48 percent of respondents say their budgets have remain unchanged, which the survey says, constitutes a cut if inflation is factored in. Over the course of three years, 38 percent of school librarians reported they had less money, 32 percent said they had more, and 30 percent said their budgets remained unchanged since 2009, says “School Libraries in 2012,” which surveyed 1,000 school librarians from April to May 2012.

But, the report says, comments by respondents show the “real hardship these bald statistics hide,” with one librarian stating, “In 8 years the budget has gone from £3,500 to £750 ($5,500 to $1,178). Last year I was allocated £500 ($785) but argued that it just could not be done and I had already spent more than that in the first month! I eventually received £800 ($1,256) but have had to be very creative about where and on what the money is spent. I’m holding it together but it is a struggle.”

The comments also gave a sense of how grim the situation in U.K. school libraries has become. “I am leaving after 26 years,” reports another librarian. “I doubt if I shall be replaced by a qualified librarian in the Main School Library.” And another stating, “I have too little paid time, to do too much work, with too little resources, especially money.”

While the report states that research in the U.S., Canada, and Australia show that effective school libraries managed by qualified librarians help boost student achievement on standardized tests, budget cuts are a serious obstacle to school libraries achieving these goals.

“As a general rule the larger schools have the larger budgets, but one school surveyed with more than 2,000 pupils only has £2 ($3.15) per pupil to spend, and one academy of more than 1,500 pupils only spends 31p (49 cents) per pupil on library budget, while another spends 62p (97 cents),” the report says. Booktrust, a U.K. lliteracy charity, recommends that secondary schools spend £14 ($22) per pupil on books.

“The results of this survey seem to indicate that there is less and less of a high quality service being provided for our students,” the report concludes. “Without the skills and pleasures that reading and researching can give us we will have a cohort of students lacking essential life and work skills.”

As a result, the U.K. School Library Association recommends that the government support trained school librarians in secondary schools as a “first step towards trained librarians in all schools” and the exploration of “co-location and facility sharing options” between public and school libraries.

“The results of this survey seem to indicate that there is less and less of a high quality service being provided for our students,” says Tricia Adams, director of the School Library Association. “Without the skills and pleasures that reading and researching can give us, we will have a cohort of students lacking even more of the life and work skills that are appropriate for today’s 21st century world of work.”

On a positive note, some respondents said they were being valued as a major contributor to the success in their schools.

“The [school library] acts as the hub of the school for learning activities,” wrote one librarian. “It is a valuable and valued space both by students and teaching colleagues alike.”

Please send your pictures of the week to sdiaz@mediasourceinc.com

The Goleta Library in Goleta, CA, part of the Santa Barbara Public Library System, celebrated a Family Place Workshop on June 1. Hunter Tattle explores his artisitic talent at a fingerpainting activity.

Chas, Dan, and Jesse Bradford (l. to r.) sharing a laugh at the Goleta Library’s Family Place Workshop.

“This is a first-of-its-kind lawsuit asserting a child’s fundamental right to read,” says Kary Moss, executive director of the ACLU of Michigan, citing that the case is on behalf of the nearly 1,000 district K-12 public school students. “We represent these children because the state and school district have simply failed to teach them to read. We do this after a long and careful process of investigation that has made clear that none of those adults charged with the care of these children, under the Constitution and laws of this state, has done their jobs.”

The groundbreaking lawsuit says the state of Michigan, its agencies that oversee public education, and Highland Park Schools have violated students’ right to read as set forth by state law and Constitution. Also adding to the problem are “serious academic deficiencies caused by a documented lack of books, outdated materials, filthy classrooms and bathrooms,” says the ACLU.

Highland Park—once the home of Chrysler—has suffered a declining population and tax base, and ranks as one of the lowest achieving school districts in the nation. An independent reading assessment of Highland Park students found them reading between four and eight grades below grade level. In fact, less than 10 percent of district kids in third through eighth grade are proficient in reading and math, according to standardized test scores by the Michigan Education Assessment Program (MEAP). By eleventh grade, when students should be college-ready, 90 percent failed reading, 97 percent failed math, 94 percent failed writing, and 100 percent failed the social studies and science portions of the 2011-2012 Michigan Merit Exam (MME).

“Highland Park students want to be educated,” adds Moss. “However, their hopes and dreams for a future are being destroyed by an ineffective system that does not adequately prepare them for life beyond school. The capacity to learn is deeply rooted in the ability to achieve literacy. A child who cannot read will be disenfranchised in our society and economy for a lifetime.”

The lack of basic reading skills for Michigan students violates state law, which mandates the provision of “additional assistance” to children who fail to read at grade level, as well as the state’s Constitution, which requires that “the legislature shall maintain and support a system of free public elementary and secondary schools” and singles out education as an important state function, explains Moss.

Writing samples documented in an ACLU report on district test scores show the extent of the problem. In a letter to Governor Rick Snyder, a fourth grader assessed at a kindergarten to first grade reading level wrote, “this is what I what to do when I grow up at Bussness laddy what And can you give my a favorite By helping me to work my way up to keep up Jobs.”

Another student, a seventh grader who was assessed as reading at the third-grade level wrote, “I go to Barber foucs school. I wish it was batter [illegible] in the clean bathroom. batter teachers and batter lunch.”

Michelle Johnson is a Highland Park resident whose daughter will enter her junior year this fall, but she reads between five and seven levels below her grade. “No one can walk through the halls of Highland Park schools and say that this is a suitable and safe environment to learn,” Johnson says, adding that she spoke at nearly every public school meeting and went to school with her kids every day. “But nothing I do will work if the district and the state don’t meet me half way. All I am asking for is a full partner in my child’s education so that she can learn the basics: reading.”

The report went on to say that the 973 students attending Highland Park’s two K-8 schools and high school were less proficient in reading than students across the state, with 78 percent of Highland Park’s third graders failing to achieve reading proficiency on the 2011-2012 MEAP test, compared to 38 percent statewide. In seventh grade, 75 percent of Highland students didn’t meet reading proficiency, compared to 40 percent across the state.

“Many children have never been given a novel to read,” Moss says, adding that school libraries are usually closed and inaccessible to students.

The ACLU of Michigan alleges that the district is further hindered by a lack a counselors and assistant principals, that students can’t study at home because they’re forced to share outdated textbooks and return them at the end of the day, that school buildings are often filthy, unheated (in the winter, students must wear their winter parkas and gloves in class), and lack security, making easy for vagrants to move in and occupy unattended rooms.

“No case ever filed anywhere in the U.S. has addressed a school system in such dire straits,” says Mark Rosenbaum, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and an ACLU cooperating attorney.

The lawsuit asks the state to use research-based methodologies to improve basic literacy skills that are administered by well-trained and supported professionals and monitored according to accepted standards of the profession.

“We ask that they put trained teachers in the classrooms,” says Moss. “We ask that they provide each child with the books they need. We ask that they provide safe and clean classrooms, bathrooms and hallways. We ask that they make a determined effort to help every child achieve reading and math literacy. We ask that they implement programs that are aimed at helping each child learn to read.”

Seven Title I media centers throughout the district continue to keep their doors open two hours each week, and local kids are welcome to read, check out books, or attend read-alouds. Although it’s not a new concept, it’s the first time Salem-Keizer has kept summer hours—and so far, kids seem to be enjoying it, says Stephen Cox, the district’s library media program specialist.

“This program is for students who are unable to get to the public library to participate in their summer reading program,” says Cox, explaining that the open school libraries are located in buildings that offer the Summer Meal program, where any qualified child age 18 and under can eat lunch, and sometimes breakfast, for free five days a week. “After and before lunch, students are encouraged to go to the school library to check out a book.”

Between 10 and 50 children visit the five elementary and two middle school libraries each week, thanks to $3,500 provided by the district’s Salem-Keizer Education Foundation to keep them open. And, as part of the program—which was widely promoted on the district’s website and at individual schools—students can earn a ticket for each book they read, which can then be entered in weekly drawings for prizes. A grand prize drawing is planned for August.

Although the libraries are run by assistants and parent volunteers rather than certified media specialists, it’s still a step in the right direction for the state’s second largest school district. Back in April 2011, the district lost 90 percent of its librarians when Superintendent Sandy Husk proposed cutting 48 elementary and middle school media specialists in an effort to save $3 million, says Cox. Oregon doesn’t mandate certified school librarians for any grade.

While it’s still too soon to know what impact summer school library hours will have on reading scores, experts know that the “summer slide,” which describes what happens when young minds sit idle for three months, is real. Studies show that kids who read during the summer gain reading skills, while those who don’t often slide backward.

“A conservative estimate of lost instructional time is approximately two months or roughly 22 percent of the school year,” says a report from the National Summer Learning Association. “It’s common for teachers to spend at least a month re-teaching material that students have forgotten over the summer. That month of re-teaching eliminates a month that could have been spent on teaching new information and skills.”

The report notes that family income plays a significant role in determining the extent of the summer slide, with students from low-income families experiencing the cumulative effects of greater learning loss each summer throughout their elementary school years.

Cox says circulation stats at the end of the summer will show just how popular the program was with students-and there are plans to conduct “action research” to find out whether the reading scores of participants went up, down, or stayed the same.

He replaces Barbara Stripling, who left the position at the end of 2011 to become a professor of practice at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies (iSchool). Stripling held the position since 2005.

Hasenyager (right) assumes his new post on July 30 and will oversee the largest school library program in the nation, with more than 1,000 media specialists spread throughout the city’s five boroughs.

“This will be an experience of a lifetime, and it’s a huge responsibility that I will not take for granted,” says Hasenyager, adding that his biggest challenge will be the sheer size of the school district, which serves 1.1 million students in more than 1,700 schools. By comparison, Hasenyager oversaw 64 buildings, 82 librarians, and 82 support staff while at San Antonio’s North East Independent School District.

However, he sees the continuation of existing partnerships with the public library and others, as well as the creation of new relationships within and outside the district, as ways to “enable us to leverage our size to provide the best to our students.”

While Hasenyager admits that the current economic downturn makes it difficult to ensure that all students in the city have access to a quality school library program, he says he’ll remain “nimble and innovative” to find solutions.

“I will need to create relationships with other district administrators to communicate the importance of a quality school library program,” says Hasenyager, who was named a 2011 Mover and Shaker by our sister publication, Library Journal. ”It is through conversations and action that will demonstrate these needs.”

Hasenyager also wants to build upon the Information Fluency Continuum,a framework that forms the basis for the skills and strategies that are essential for students to become independent readers and learners, which was created by Stripling and her team during her tenure. The next step, he says, is to ensure that the city’s school librarians-as well as its administrators and teachers-are offered adequate professional development to carry out the plan.

Recruiting classroom teachers as school librarians is also high on Hasenyager’s agenda. While in Texas, he successfully convinced teachers about the benefits of continuing their studies and becoming certified school librarians.

“I will work to partner with universities to provide them the education they need in order to help students become fully certified school librarians,” he says.”This will require the director of library services to apply for grants to allow us to reduce the cost of education for those pursing a Master’s degree, with an emphasis in school librarianship.”

Hasenyager says he’s qualified for the new position because he has a firm grasp on the big picture when it comes to how library programs fit into the overall classroom instruction-and he can successfully communicate that vision to others. In addition, he says, his leadership style unites-rather than divides groups-and he makes decisions based on what’s best for his students.

Another hitch? The deadline for the school literacy grants is August 10 at 4:30 p.m. EST, which doesn’t give applicants much time to prepare and fill out the lengthy online form.

The American Library Association says it’s grateful that the U.S. Congress-with Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) taking the lead-passed an appropriations bill in December, which created the Innovative Approaches to Literacy Program and made $28.6 million in federal funds available for programs that “improve the quality of elementary and secondary education at the state and local levels and help all students meet challenging state academic content standards and student achievement standards.” The bill specifically states that half of the money must go toward school libraries and the other half toward literacy initiatives such as Reading is Fundamental or Reach Out and Read.

But what took the DOE so long to make the grants available, especially since they were expected in late spring, while schools were still in session? Phone calls and emails to DOE officials in charge of the program went unanswered.

“The American Library Association is disappointed that it took the U.S. Department of Education many months to release this grant application,” says Jeff Kratz, assistant director of ALA’s Office of Government Relations, adding that ALA is still grateful for the federal school library funds, which in effect replaces the Improving Literacy Through School Libraries grants that the DOE zeroed out in May 2011. That program was created in 2001 as the only federal program specifically geared toward providing funds for school libraries-and also was spearheaded by Reed.

Both programs distribute competitive grants to help students in low-income school districts have access to up-to-date school library materials. The Innovative Approaches program is specifically designed to support innovative literacy programs for young children, increase student achievement by using school libraries, and motivate older children to read. According to the DOE, the grants are to be used to “develop and improve literacy skills for children and students from birth through 12th grade within the attendance boundaries of high-need local educational agencies.”

Local education agencies must apply for the grants on behalf of school libraries and can use the money to support school libraries and purchase materials. The DOE has emphasized the need for school libraries when it announced the program, saying, “Many schools and districts across the Nation do not have school libraries that deliver high-quality literacy programming to children and their families. Additionally, many schools do not have qualified library media specialists and library facilities. Where facilities do exist, they are often under-resourced and lack adequate books and other materials. In many communities, high-need children and students have limited access to appropriate age- and grade-level reading material in their homes.”

ALA says it “encourages school librarians to apply for the program grants,” which will amount to about 30 grants in the $150,000 to $750,000 range.

Applicants must register with Grants.gov in order to apply, and the DOE says registration may take five or more business days to complete. “We strongly recommend that you do not wait until the last day to submit your application,” reads the DOE website, explaining that Grants.gov will put a date and time stamp on all applications and then process them after they’re fully uploaded. The time it takes to upload an application will “vary depending on a number of factors, including the size of the application and the speed of your Internet connection, and the time it takes Grants.gov to process the application will vary as well.” If Grants.gov rejects an application, applicants must resubmit successfully before the August 10, 4:30:00 p.m. deadline.

By law, half of the $28.6 million appropriated under Innovative Approaches to Literacy must be allocated to a competitive grant program for underserved school libraries, and the remaining money will be allocated to competitive grants for national nonprofit organizations that work to improve childhood literacy. Funding is expected to be distributed no later than September 2012.

To get tips on how to apply for the literacy grant program, visit the ALA Innovative Approaches to Literacy application guide webpage.

House Bill 2712 gives Arizona the authority to enforce filtering requirements in both school districts and public libraries that accept funding from the state. While Arizona already has laws in place requiring libraries and schools to filter, the new ruling goes further by allowing lawmakers to withhold 10 percent of their monthly budget, says Aiden Fleming, legislative liaison for the Arizona Department of Education (DOE), explaining that the new law now has “some teeth.”

Federal law already requires K-12 schools and public libraries to comply with filtering laws as set forth in the Children Internet Protection Act (CIPA). Those who don’t comply risk losing federal e-rate funding, which provides for certain technology services such as Internet connections.

Arizona lawmakers, however, felt the need to update current laws to ensure they were being enforced. The bill’s new language specifies, in part, what content schools and libraries must block, describing it now as “visual depictions that are child pornography, harmful to minors or obscene.” The law also states that schools and libraries must create a policy to enforce the ban on these materials, and they must make the rules available to the public. Libraries can unblock filters if an adult needs to access blocked material.

If a school or library doesn’t comply, it has 60 days to change the policy. After that, the state can withhold up to 10 percent of funding until the problem is resolved.

Still, Fleming notes that there’s no way for the DOE, in particular, to monitor whether schools, at least, actually place filters on computers, which could add a wrinkle to the law’s new tough stance.

“We don’t have any official way of finding out, unless a school is turned in,” he says.

While the penalty for noncompliance is steep, Fleming says the DOE doesn’t know of any school without filters. And so there’s little concern that the new law will catch anyone by surprise.

“Every district complies with CIPA,” he says. “So there shouldn’t be any school in the state that is not complying.”

The Phoenix Public Library also says it’s been complying with CIPA and works with the company, Websense, to block harmful sites.

A whopping 79 percent of the voting public say they’ve heard nothing or not much about the standards in math and English, developed through a multi-state initiative led by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, according to a report by the DC-based Achieve called, “Growing Awareness, Growing Support: Teacher and Voter Understanding of the Common Core State Standards & Assessments.”

With the new standards and assessments affecting more than 42 million K-12 students and 2.7 million educators nationwide, it’s not surprising that there’s been a significant rise—from 68 percent in August 2011 to 87 percent today—in the number of teachers who say they know about the CCSS, the report says.

But both educators and the public—regardless of age, education level, race, ethnicity, or party affiliation—strongly support the standards and assessments once they understand its goals.

Survey respondents were read this brief description: “These new standards have been set to internationally competitive levels in English and math. This means that students may be more challenged by the material they study, and the tests they take will measure more advanced concepts and require students to show their work.”

When provided this information, 77 percent of voters say they support implementing them, which the report says, further reinforces “the conclusion that more knowledge about the CCSS leads to a more positive view of the standards.”

Meanwhile, an overwhelming majority of teachers, 72 percent, support the standards.

“The more teachers know about the Common Core State Standards, the more positive their impression, with the highest favorability ratings among those educators who know ‘a lot’ about the CCSS,” the report says. “The data also suggest that opposition among teachers is somewhat concentrated among those with the least amount of knowledge about the standards.”

As a result, the report says, it’s critical to “sustain and even ramp up” efforts to inform educators about the details of state implementation plans and what teachers can expect in terms of professional development, aligned instructional materials, and opportunities for cross-state collaboration.

It also an opportunity for school librarians to step up and be noticed. Since reading is at the core of the CCSS, media specialists are in the perfect position to collaborate with teachers to identify literature and texts for students to read in the content areas. And since the standards are interdisciplinary, librarians can help teachers make connections across various subjects.

The American Association of School Librarians (AASL) encourages its members to study the standards to determine how library programs support students in meeting the CCSS.

“As students strive to meet the rigor of the standards, certified school librarians will play an essential part in ensuring that 21st-century information literacy skills, dispositions, responsibilities and assessments are integrated throughout all curriculum areas,” AASL says. “The school library professional as leader, instructional partner, information specialist, teacher, and program administrator is critical for teaching and learning in today’s schools.”

The more teachers know about the CCSS, the more supportive they were of implementing the standards, including new assessments, says Sandy Boyd, Achieve’s senior vice president of strategic initiatives. “These findings demonstrate the importance of communicating with educators, especially as the task at hand moves from broad awareness of the standards to the deep understanding necessary for the CCSS to be taught in every classroom. Ongoing professional learning opportunities and support will be key.” Of the teachers who have seen, read, or heard about the CCSS, 68 percent currently have a favorable impression of them, up from 59 percent in August 2011.

More voter awareness about CCSS and what it means for students and parents also are key, the report adds. These include knowing how will these expectations change and what kind of supportl struggling students will receive, as well as how will these changes fit into the broader educational reform agenda, why it’s important, and what value will the new standards have on our education system, economy, and country.

“Voters support the implementation of the CCSS, but they, too, will need more information about the CCSS and what it means as the standards move from being an idea to a reality in schools,” says Boyd.

The national study is based on surveys with 1,000 registered voters and 500 K-12 teachers from May 6-10, 2012. The poll has a margin of error of +3.1 percent among voters and +4.4 percent among teachers.