Is Her Face Red!

Eric Oatman -- School Library Journal, 11/1/2005

Last month, Anne Hendricks-Browning, the librarian at the Luella Middle School in McDonough, GA, tossed a letter into a wastebasket—and nearly missed the news that she had won a $15,000 worth of security equipment from 3M Corporation. The letter didn't stay long in the wastebasket. She remembered she had applied for a grant six months earlier, pulled the letter out of the trash, and "you could hear me hooting all down the hall," she says.

"It's really a good grant," she says. Under its Salute to Schools program, 3M donated a total of $1.5 million worth of security equipment to 100 middle school and high school libraries this year. Each grant provides magnetic strips for books and library equipment and a detection system for the library's exit.

The experience has changed Hendricks-Browning routine. "Librarians get more junk mail than anybody," she says. "But I've learned to process my junk mail a little bit better."