Seeing Is Believing

It’s time to resurrect an old idea and demonstrate our value

By Brian Kenney, Editor-in-Chief -- School Library Journal, 12/1/2006

I’m an occasional volunteer at a middle school not far from my house. Although it’s in an old building in a poor neighborhood, it refuses to fit the cliché of a down-and-out urban school. Its faculty is innovative and excited by their work; most of the 300 students are engaged learners; scores of parents are involved in the school community; and the facility, despite its age, is clean and welcoming.

But the school remains, in my eyes, a pretty sad place. The reason? It’s missing a library, and, more importantly, a librarian.

My own contributions are modest. I help teachers select classroom reference books and leisure-reading titles, which go to the “book room,” a slightly renovated janitor’s closet. I explain the state-supported databases that they have free access to (news to most teachers), introduce them to helpful sites, such as the Librarians’ Internet Index, and explain how to use tools like PBwiki. The school has plenty of laptops and the young faculty is very tech savvy about setting up WiFi, but they’re clueless when it comes to finding appropriate online content for their students. A shocking situation? Hardly.

My visits also have a subversive purpose. I want the staff to see school libraries as vital learning centers that contribute to kids’ intellectual, personal, and social development. I want them to see school librarians as partners in meeting curriculum standards and boosting student achievement. And I want the administration to eventually hire a school librarian and create an actual physical library!

What is shocking is that no one—from the principal to the newest teacher—has any idea of what I’m talking about. They’ve never seen a good school library, never mind a good school librarian in action. They’re polite, but I can tell they think I’m crazy when I yammer on about the benefits of a school library.

I thought about that school last month at the SLJ Summit (we’ll have more on the Summit in our January issue) when one of the working groups recommended that we “provide stakeholders with instructional materials, information, and model school libraries to demonstrate excellence.” That’s exactly what my local educators need, I realized, a visit to a model school library.

This isn’t a new idea, as Frances Roscello of the New York Department of Education quickly reminded me. Back in the ’60s, the Knapp School Libraries Project funded eight schools to serve as “examples of quality school library services to pupils and teachers.” By many measures, these demonstration schools were a great success. More than 16,000 people visited them during the project. And they didn’t just go to the library, they visited classrooms where they witnessed library materials making a difference. These demonstration schools had wide-ranging impact, not just on libraries and education, but on “citizen education” as well.

Are today’s school librarians much different than those 40 years ago? Yes and no. Certainly the role of the library media specialist has evolved far beyond just finding information—now there’s an emphasis on helping students create knowledge.

But large swathes of the educational world, not to mention the citizenry, still don’t get what school librarians do. They would if they spent an afternoon with one of the winners of the National School Library Media Program of the Year Award from the American Association of School Librarians or the SLJ/Thomson Gale Giant Step Awards, which honor dynamic librarians, or any of the various state awards.

It’s time for the school library community to start demonstrating again. It needs to identify its best libraries, find funds to support them, get the word out, and then wait for droves of visitors to arrive. Difficult? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely. Because “seeing” just might save us.