She Gets It
by Renée Olson, Editor-in-Chief -- School Library Journal, 1/1/1999
A new school librarian in Chicago knows what's important.
It's common for keynote speakers at library conferences to wax lyrically about librarians who inspired them as children. Politicians and authors are particularly good at this. In such situations, I sit and listen distractedly simply because I can't remember any librarians from my childhood, even though I was at the Skokie (IL) Public Library so often I probably should have paid rent. In my case, my mother was my librarian.
But if I were to pick a favorite librarian now, I know who I would choose. Her name is Terezka Jirasek.
I met Jirasek, a gregarious woman who seems much younger than her 45 years, on a three-day whirlwind tour of library media centers in the Chicago Public Schools in October. (See "The Rescuers", SLJ Jan 1999). While I was extremely impressed with many people I met, Jirasek stood out. She has an uncanny grasp of how to get kids to invest themselves in reading-and she's been on the job just three years. She is someone the profession should clone as soon as it becomes possible.
At the John Spry Community School in Little Village, a largely Hispanic neighborhood, Jirasek's students are stakeholders in the library, a significant perk in an elementary school where only 23 percent of third graders read at grade level. She has 13 library assistants, 120 junior and senior librarians, and 48 members in three library clubs.
Jirasek offers an impressive book selection project that would fit nicely into a library school curriculum. The project is simple: pairs of students survey classmates and pore over wholesaler catalogs, selecting $50 worth of books to buy. Members of the student selection committee also sharpen their math skills by figuring out shipping and handling costs.
Besides serving as a real-life lesson in library management (the real-life aspect being, of course, the minuscule budget), the project develops entrepreneurial and decision-making skills that prepare students to be future CEOs-or the Librarian of Congress. "Lots of kids come in wanting to just buy Goosebumps, but I ask them, `If you had only $50, would you want to buy all Goosebumps?'" says Jirasek, who gently suggests alternatives. Still, believing that it's important for students to have a sense of ownership in the library, Jirasek lets them have the final say.
When the eagerly awaited orders arrived last year, some students complained that they didn't get to pick books. Asked if they had sat on the student selection committee, the standard response was, "No, I didn't want to stay after school." Jirasek's reply to that is always, "Well, that's where decisions are made."
Jirasek knows a little something herself about being in the right place when it comes to having influence -- on the advice of her principal, she is chairing her school's site-based management committee this year, the group that controls the finances. Her managerial savvy was honed, no doubt, from having spent more than a decade as the executive director of a group of 10 geriatric care centers before becoming a teacher and then a library media specialist.
I chose to write about Jirasek this month because she embodies what is best in a school librarian -- a warm heart, skill, and a lively entrepreneurial spirit. If I were entering the field, I'd much rather spend a day with her than read a stack of professional textbooks or the new edition of Information Power, the rather dispassionate library media center guidelines from the American Association of School Librarians. While cloning Jirasek is appealing for that reason, I'd make just one minor change in her genetic blueprint. I'd do away with her habit of getting up at 4 a.m. She makes night owls like me look bad.
Renée Olson
Editor-in-Chief
rolson@slj.cahners.com
