In Sync—Administrator of the Year 2006

Short Pump Middle School sits among the green acres of Richmond, Virginia’s exurbia like some sort of surrealist architectural vision. Fronted by soccer and football fields, and constructed from pink and white stone, with a slanting green metal roof and a round silo-like center, this eye-catching school looks for the world like a working farm.

But the “crop” here is students. And that silo? That’s the circular school library—a spacious and airy Jeffersonian structure (this is Virginia, after all), 84 feet wide across at its base, with walls that rise 22 feet into the air, up to a dome that adds another 16 soaring feet.

It’s appropriate that Short Pump’s media center sits in the middle of the school because this library is the house that Lynn Henry Thorpe built, while principal during its 1990 planning year and 1991 opening. Thorpe believes passionately that libraries are central to successful learning. And Short Pump shows it.

“We’re the hub of the school, and Lynn Thorpe is the person who pressed that upon us,” says Marcialyn Ellis, Short Pump’s founding librarian, who recalls her double take that opening day in 1991 when her boss rolled up her sleeves and helped unbox and shelve 9,000 new volumes.

Today, Short Pump—named for an old stagecoach watering stop—has 16,000 volumes in its library. Thorpe, meanwhile, has moved on to become assistant superintendent for instruction for Henrico County Public Schools, a 48,000-student, 66-school district that includes subdivisions with $400,000 homes but also depressed rural areas, all ringing Richmond to the north and east. She is also this year’s Administrator of the Year award winner, recognized by SLJ and cosponsor Greenwood Publishing Group for her unflagging support of school libraries.

When describing Thorpe’s fervor for libraries, “support” may be an understatement. “Visionary” and “enthusiasm” are just some of the superlatives used by the librarians who nominated her. “Dr. Thorpe has a passion for libraries and reading that is evident to all who have the opportunity to work for her,” Ann Martin, Henrico’s educational specialist for library information services, wrote in the award application. Thorpe, she continued, “stands beside us when addressing intellectual freedom and instructional issues…. She knows and lives Information Power.”

Thorpe herself, a blond-haired, brown-eyed 55-year-old with a soft Southern drawl and warm smile, carries that mantle proudly. There are many ways to bring about change, she says: “You do it by what’s in the budget and by what you keep and what you throw away; and then you do it by what you devote time to and what you hold up as a model. You also do it by the relationship piece, which for me is easy, because I absolutely believe that what goes on in our library is bedrock key to what goes on in the schools.”

Thorpe has enjoyed generous support in Henrico County. The school system’s annual book budget is $340,000; and its 66 school libraries hold 620,000 volumes. Middle and high school students also have used personal laptops since 2003—an initiative believed to have been the nation’s largest such effort at the time. Moreover, the schools have wi-fi and the libraries are well stocked with computers. The schools’ Web site is the gateway to 18 databases, which cost $100,000 a year over and above the state-supported resources.

A history of innovation

Thorpe, as Short Pump’s principal, took this tech emphasis further. She brought in a $100,000 PracTek system that lets teachers order by phone AV materials, which are then sent virtually to their classrooms. All of Henrico’s schools now have PracTek. And outside Short Pump’s library are two “synergistics” technology labs that Thorpe introduced in place of traditional shop and mechanical drawing classes. Thanks to Thorpe’s Short Pump model, middle schoolers districtwide now get a taste of robotics, video editing, and even wind-tunnel technology.

Librarians give Thorpe credit for other initiatives—dating back to her days, from 1995 to 2004, as director of elementary education—that have strengthened their role as teachers. One such move was Thorpe’s systemwide promotion of the Big6, a popular research and problem-solving strategy for students.

An even larger initiative was Thorpe’s promotion of flexible scheduling in middle school libraries, which she then introduced to elementary school media centers—a unique move at the time. Gone from Henrico is the old chestnut “It’s 2 p.m. on Wednesday—time for library.” Instead, students can walk in any time their teachers let them. Visiting the library, in fact, is viewed as a kind of reward: Short Pump’s media center offers a centralized circle of comfy couches that kids find irresistible. Indeed, on the day of SLJ’s visit, a boy is curled up, immersed in a sci-fi comic—and no one’s telling him to get his feet off the couch.

This day, too, Kristina Nero’s seventh-grade English class is having a look around at the resources they’ll be using on research projects this year. Colonial America? Amoebas? Henrico librarians are ready, with suggested Web sites, books, and databases.

Support for librarians, too

It’s no surprise that Ellis, the Short Pump librarian, calls Thorpe “huge on collaboration.” Besides flexible scheduling, the assistant superintendent has promoted a mentoring program for newly certified librarians. “Growing your own from within is a strengthening process,” Thorpe says.

She has supported librarians in other ways, including setting aside budget dollars to place full-time support staff in all secondary and most elementary school libraries. That’s won her librarians’ undying support. And last spring Thorpe returned their compliments, feting all 83 of them with an “April Is School Library Media Month” celebration complete with brass band, buffet, and speeches. Get-togethers are common here: “I’ve never been in a system where we have quarterly meetings that provide training and answer questions about what is going on,” says Martin, the systemwide library chief.

At Arthur Ashe Elementary School, another beautifully appointed institution, on the opposite side of Henrico County from Short Pump in more ways than one (incomes on Richmond’s east side are lower, and minority kids are in the majority), Linda Owen, the school’s librarian for 13 years, is ushering pint-size researchers into the world of databases. She describes how these third graders are starting with dictionaries; later they’ll look up facts on specific animals. This month, they will use the library’s research stations to learn about ancient Greece, with some students studying the Olympics via online encyclopedias and others using books to identify the library’s own Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns. By fifth grade, Arthur Ashe students use “task cards” for research, searching online databases and CD-ROMs with an acuity that probably outranks most 30-year-olds’.

This is the creative environment that Thorpe pushes for: Martin laughs remembering how she once walked into a school library to find the media specialist handing out Hershey’s Kisses; her point was to illustrate, for a unit on ancient Egypt, what pyramids looked like. Owen, at Arthur Ashe, agrees about Thorpe’s impact. “It’s nothing like it was when I was a 'drop-off’ at the door,” she says, referring to some teachers’ habit of using the library as a free period. “Now they really do see me as a partner in instructing.”

This partnership has been underscored by Thorpe’s insistence that information services be positioned under the instructional umbrella; her emphasis on literacy programs in schools; and her support for programs that bring to Henrico schools such literary stars as Will Hobbs and Gordon Korman (with an anticipated visit from Christopher Paul Curtis, using the $5,000 prize awarded by Greenwood Publishing to the Administrator of the Year).

Thorpe, herself the daughter of a librarian, who admits cultivating her own love of books with repeated childhood readings of The Yearling (“Sometimes I wouldn’t read all the way to the end,” she says, of that classic’s tragic finale), also is extolled by staffers for her personal warmth. Martin recalls the personal support she received from Thorpe during a challenge from an angry parent to a classroom reading list.

Thorpe isn’t finished yet. “We’re not at the max,” she says of her libraries. “In some schools, the librarian is absolutely a voice that is important in leadership decisions. In other schools, it’s not as strong. We have to expect that. We want there to be growth wherever we have our librarians.”

One initiative Thorpe is creating to spur that growth is a pioneering new Department of Nontraditional Programs to focus on “nontraditional learners”—smart kids who can’t cope with schedules and highly structured learning. Although it’s still in the planning stage, she says that libraries will be the key to its success. Somehow, with Thorpe at the helm, it’s difficult to imagine any other outcome.