Short Takes

NSLMPY Awards Revealed

This year’s National School Library Media Program of the Year Award (NSLMPY) goes to three school districts: the Hilliard City School District in Ohio; Biblioteca Las Americas in Mercedes, TX; and Kapolei High School in Hawaii (above). Sponsored by Follett Library Resources, this award from the American Association of School Librarians honors excellence in school media. “In each of the schools and districts, the school library media specialists are acknowledged as curriculum leaders,” says NSLMPY Chair Gail Dickinson. “Administration, fellow teachers, and students acknowledge that role, and provided examples of ways in which they depend on the school library media program as the central focus of teaching and learning.” Each winner receives a $10,000 prize.

Critics Pan 'Hoot’ Movie

Critics didn’t give a hoot about the movie version of Carl Hiaasen’s Hoot (Knopf, 2002). The movie, based on the Caldecott Honor winner, debuted in May and recounts how a group of kids try to save burrowing owls from a building project. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times panned the movie as “an inane dead zone of sitcom clichés.” And New York Daily News reviewer Jami Bernard says that it “tacitly encourages kids to vandalize property and behave like little ecoterrorists.”