Five Librarians, One 50-Foot Phone Cord, and a Whole Lot of Chutzpah
Walter Minkel -- School Library Journal, 3/1/1999
Illustration by Susan Romano
If you've ever attended a meeting of public librarians or lurked on a listserv that they frequent, you've heard this refrain: communication between schools and public libraries is lousy. (Not always, but much of the time.) In theory, library media specialists are the bridge between teachers and public librarians. But as school budgets have been slashed and educators have come to feel increasingly overworked, keeping in touch with the public librarian has become a low (or a no) priority. In many communities, the only regular communication between the school and the public library occurs after school and on weekends, when crowds of students throng the reference desk, removing everything on desert biomes before the reference staff is aware there is an assignment.
Is it possible to forge stronger, more supportive partnerships between schools and public libraries?
Here in Oregon, we think we've discovered a solution. A year and a half ago, we launched an innovative program that encourages public librarians to reach out to and collaborate with their school counterparts. The program is called School Corps -- and according to early reports from the school librarians, teachers, and students that we serve, it's been a welcomed success.
Our Mission
Four other librarians and I no longer spend much time in our public library. These days, we're out of the library and in the schools. As members of the Multnomah County Library's School Corps, our job is to build closer relationships between the 250 public and private K-12 schools in the county (which includes the city of Portland) and the public library. We do not take the place of school librarians. In fact, we promote the role of the library media specialist and help out whenever we can.
What else do we do? We tell students and teachers how great the public library is. We encourage them to get Multnomah County Library cards -- and to use them. And we train them to use our online catalog, periodicals database, and our Web sites, such as the KidsPage (www.multnomah.lib.or.us/lib/kids/) and the 2,000-sites-and-growing Homework Center (www.multnomah.lib.or.us/lib/homework/). Although our focus is on sharing our library's technology, we also present booktalks for all grades and supply "Webliographies" of Web sites that we've found helpful for teachers and students. We keep busy: between September 1997 and December 1998, we served nearly 34,000 students and teachers in 325 classrooms and groups.
How We Happened
Between 1990 and 1996, many schools in Oregon began to see their budgets shrink. The fiscal cutbacks were the result of a series of state initiatives that limited the amount of property taxes that could be collected. The new tax measures shifted much of the responsibility for school funding from local communities to the state legislature, which opted to reapportion the state's school funds. Under the legislature's plan, underfunded rural school districts would receive more money, and adequately funded urban and suburban school districts (which include Multnomah County) would now have to make do with less.
One of the consequences of this policy was that school librarians were laid off or reduced to half time in several of the districts served by the Multnomah County Library. Over a five-year period, beginning in 1992, 13 percent of the library media specialists in our county were eliminated. The property tax measures also threatened the Multnomah County Library. By late 1996, it looked as if our funding would be reduced by 40 percent, forcing us to shut down some of our branches and lay off or reassign at least a third of our youth services librarians. Faced with this gloomy prospect, our youth services coordinator, Ellen Fader, came up with the idea behind School Corps. She thought we needed to offer a supplemental program that would provide library services to students who were served by branches about to close. Fortunately, our library's budget gradually improved, and we were able to avoid closing our branches. But with impending cuts in library hours in the offing, Fader realized that students' access to information would soon suffer.
It was obvious to us that there was a great need for a program like School Corps. We decided to take our case to the board of county commissioners. As luck would have it, the county commissioners shared our concern that its schools were headed for problems over the next few years, as the effects of the property tax measures were felt locally. The county commissioner's office also agreed with us that schools needed to be served more directly by the public library, and they voted to approve $214,000 to fund our project's first year. To this largesse, we soon added two grants: $50,000 from the Wells Fargo Bank and $60,000 from the Meyer Foundation.
Now some of you may be thinking: Couldn't a portion of that public money have gone directly to school libraries? The answer is no. In our region, schools and public libraries receive budget support from different agencies -- school districts fund public schools, counties fund public libraries.
Hit the Ground Running
During the final week of August 1997, we kicked off the School Corps program with three of us in place, all current Multnomah County Library youth librarians: Kate Houston, Jackie Partch, and me, Walter Minkel. A few months later, we added two more team members: Vailey Oehlke from the ITT Tech Library in Portland and Sara Ryan from the University of Michigan's Internet Public Library Project. Fader made it clear that she expected significant results from us. But we didn't need prompting; we were excited about what we were doing and hit the ground running.
We spent the first three months creating a curriculum and making contacts with Multnomah County's nine school districts and numerous private schools. Then we met with groups of educators, library media specialists, and administrators, sharing the PowerPoint presentation we had labored over, which explained our goals and services. We also made sure to let everyone know that our services were offered free of charge. Within a few weeks, teachers and school librarians began booking our programs. At first, the requests trickled in, but by the end of 1997, at least two of us were spending the entire school day in the schools.
The Great Library Card Adventure
One of our earliest projects was registering as many elementary school students as possible for Multnomah County Library cards. We called the project the "Great Library Card Adventure," and it was a big success. Here's how it worked. The five schools who came closest to registering all of their students, faculty, and staff for library cards would each earn a prize. The prizes (underwritten by Starbucks Coffee) were performances of Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham and Gertrude McFuzz, performed at each school by members of a local children's theater troupe.
We mailed letters and posters to 150 public and private schools, inviting them to take part in the contest; 103 schools signed up. Much to our surprise, four schools registered 100 percent of their members. The fifth school, our runner-up, had "only" a 99.44-percent registration rate.
In February and March of 1998, we sponsored a similar contest for middle and high schools called "Get Carded!" In all, we issued nearly 11,000 new library cards to elementary, middle, and secondary school members during the two campaigns. Best of all, in the following nine-month period, the cards were used almost 42,000 times.
In-Service with a Smile
Many of the schools in Multnomah County have been wired for Internet use within the past two years, and it appears that the Net has been dropped into many busy classroom teachers' laps without sufficient training. (That's probably why our teacher-training programs have been so well received.) When we do in-service training in the schools, we hook up our laptops to the school district's network or to Multnomah County Library's server via a phone line. Then we connect our InFocus projectors to our laptops and begin our presentation. In this way, we've been able to teach library media specialists and teachers how to get the most out of our library's online resources: the online catalog, the Information Access database, and the Multnomah County Library of Web Sites.
Learning Our Lessons
As we began visiting students in classrooms, we quickly became adept at hauling high-tech equipment, hefting folding screens, and wheeling projector cases in and out of our cars and up and down school stairways. We learned to switch Internet server addresses quickly and to switch over to a "canned" PowerPoint presentation about online resources when we were unable to access the Internet. We also learned that our modems won't connect to the Net if the school media center has only a multiline phone jack.
And we soon learned to carry a 50-foot phone cord, since phone jacks in schools are often hidden in unusual spots. My teammate Jackie Partch and I once plugged our modem into a phone jack in a nearby, vacant classroom, only to have a counselor and a group of kids walk into the room a few minutes later and unknowingly unplug us in the middle of our catalog demonstration. Luckily, by then we had mastered the art of improvisation.
Our high-tech equipment gained us the (sometimes misplaced) admiration of many students. Once, a middle-school girl stopped two of us (Jackie Partch and a leather-jacketed Sara Ryan), while we were hauling around our black equipment cases. The girl thought we were members of a rock 'n' roll band. And on another occasion, as I carried a folding screen in its shiny metal case across the campus of a Catholic school, I heard one second-grade boy exclaim to another: "Oh, cool! He's got a bazooka."
A Great Experiment
So far the evaluation forms returned to us have been overwhelmingly positive. For example, Joanne LaCroix, a third- and fourth-grade teacher at Meek Elementary School in Portland, complimented us on doing "a great job holding the students' interest." (No small feat given the age group.) And further up the educational spectrum, Karen Gaddis-Philips, a library media specialist at Sam Barlow High School in Gresham, assured us that everybody loved the Webliographies -- especially the teachers. We've also received a number of unsolicited endorsements from teachers and school librarians, recommending us to their colleagues.
One of the most pleasant parts of working in School Corps is our collaborative work style. We work in cubicles, surrounded by a big oak library table and a white board. When issues or problems arise, several of us will break into spontaneous brainstorming sessions and meetings. And sometimes we argue over which was better, '70s music or '80s music. It's a great way to work.
Jackie Partch fields most of the phone calls from schools inquiring about bookings, and she'll either shout out to whomever is near, "Who wants this one?" or she'll send us all an e-mail message, asking for volunteers.
At this point, we're not sure how much longer our library will be able to fund the team, but we hope we'll be around at least a few more years. One thing we are sure of: we get a genuine kick out of pulling schools and public libraries closer together.
Get Your Free Programs!Here's a brief list of some of the services that School Corps provides. |
| Check This Place Out! (grades K-4) This presentation answers basic questions about libraries, such as "What is a library?" "How can I get a library card?" and "What do librarians do?" |
| Great Authors and Illustrators (grades K-1, 2-3, and 4-5) A look at some of the authors and illustrators that young people like best, and how to find out more about them on the Web. |
| Research Methods (grades 6-12 and adult) A survey of library resources that are useful for doing research. This program may be customized to meet your needs. For example, we offer a program on general research methods for doing term papers; we also offer specific recommendations for, say, seventh graders who are researching alternative energy resources. |
| Financial Aid/College Information (grades 9-12) An introduction to our library's print and electronic resources on sources of financial aid and colleges. |
| Customized Parent/Family Program (all ages) A presentation on technology, literacy, and research that may be tailored to meet your audience's needs. |
