SC Librarians Laud Top Administrator

All that good work has paid off. Harner was named Administrator of the Year on March 6 by the South Carolina Association of School Librarians for his great support of school libraries. Some 50 media specialists showed up for the award ceremony in Columbia, SC, waving fans with Harner's face printed on them. Harner's supporters were so taken with his accomplishments that they've nominated him for the 2003 American Association of School Librarians' Distinguished School Administrator Award.

"While we are facing financial struggles, media centers will remain a priority. Media services are an integral part of the education plan," Harner says. "We strive to be the best."

Indeed, Harner's accomplishments in his three short years as superintendent are impressive: last spring he worked with the school board to pass a budget allocating $1.2 million annually for the next five years to build new library collections, and most recently he secured more than $400,000 for 418 new computers, says Robbie Van Pelt, the district's media services coordinator.

Harner, who heads 84 schools in South Carolina's largest school district, regularly visits library media centers and attends faculty meetings to explain the importance of weeding old collections. And he recently invited Bob Berkowitz, cocreator of the Big6 approach to teaching, to train all of Greenville's 97 certified librarians. Harner's also a supporter of Keith Curry Lance, whose studies show that student achievement is linked to well-equipped school libraries led by certified media specialists.

Harner's career as an administrator got off to a rough start. Many school librarians were up in arms in 2000 when, following a teacher's complaint, he tried to ban Lois Duncan's Killing Mr. Griffin (Laurel-Leaf, 1993), about a student who accidentally killed his teacher. A former infantry officer, Harner says he now understands the formal procedures for handling book complaints and would not interfere with First Amendment rights. "I'm against censorship—intellectual freedom is a constitutionally protected right," he says.