Making the Teacher Connection
-- School Library Journal, 1/14/2009
About 18 months ago, Central Rappahannock Regional Library (CRRL), Virginia, needed to take a good look at their school outreach. Four jurisdictions in the service area were opening more schools but the library was not able to add new staff. Staff intensive grade K-8 booktalking programs were no longer possible to support. Taking time to consider alternatives, the library held brainstorming sessions, conducted focus groups of teachers and librarians, and spent a full day with administration working with youth services staff to come up with a new plan for outreach. One resource that came out of this work is three, grade level Library Lowdown electronic newsletters for elementary, middle and high school teachers.
“One key thing we kept hearing from teachers is that they wanted us to communicate better with them, hence the newsletters,” states Caroline Parr, coordinator of youth services. “Our library already does three newsletters for the public, so we had some expertise on hand in terms of formatting and distribution. We now have a youth services staff person designated to produce each one and use our youth services staff wiki to post what each branch wants to highlight for programs.” Staff agreed on common elements for some of the modules, making it easy for editors just cut and paste. Teachers repeatedly told library staff to keep newsletter content short, since they are time-challenged, and editors have complied. The Library Lowdown newsletters currently have over 400 subscribers.
Library Lowdown newsletters allow CRRL to get fresh information into teacher’s mailboxes on a regular basis. This currency addresses, in part, the challenge of keeping content current and accurate on CRRL’s Teachers’ Place portal. For example, only one of the counties that CRRL serves posts its curriculum maps online, which are added to the Standards of Learning (SOL) being studied during each 9-week period. The three other jurisdictions don't provide that information, so CRRL can only use their best educated guesses. Most of the SOLs and Character Education book lists on Teacher’s Place were created some time ago and CRRL has not had the resources to update these. The library is currently redesigning AnswerPoint, CRRL’s primary Website, and Parr plans to make some changes with SOL links and update Character Education lists as part of that project.
CRRL finds that Teachers' Place is used most by teachers placing Classroom Carryout requests, which they get hundreds of each month from mostly preschool and elementary teachers, with an occasional request from a middle school teacher. And though CRRL provides an Assignment Alert form, and has for several years, it is barely used. On the other hand, Parr has seen a big jump in use of Live Homework Help, which she attributes to database presentations given to 6th, 9th and 12th grades. Live Homework Help use went up 25 percent from 2007 to 2008.
Feedback to CRRL’s added and continuing services for teachers has been positive. “We have great relationships with our school librarians, and the efforts we have made to make our school outreach more meaningful really grew from their feedback to us, as well as ideas from our staff,” states Parr. “The next challenge is how to continue our successful outreach efforts in a new environment, where there is no money and positions are frozen - stay tuned to see how we figure this out!”
