HS Senior Explains Why She Doesn't Usethe School Library
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Debra Lau Whelan -- School Library Journal, 10/30/2007
High school senior Andrea Drusch ticked off a lot of media specialists—not to mention her own school librarian—with her recent scathing editorial in The Dallas Morning News about all the things wrong with today’s media centers. Even Omar Wasow, cofounder of BlackPlanet.com, mentioned the teenager’s views during his closing remarks at the American Association of School Librarians conference in Reno, NV, last weekend. Wasow stressed the need to address these kinds of concerns if libraries want to play a key role in the 21st century.
All the 18-year-old budding journalist wants is a Barnes & Noble/Starbucks-like atmosphere, where kids can walk in at any time, sit back, browse titles, and perhaps have a nibble and a drink. But she ended up getting a lot of angry email messages. SLJ caught up with Drusch to talk about the kinds of changes that would make her and her friends frequent their school library.
What responses have you gotten to your editorial?
I got a lot of emails from other school librarians who were really, really negative about it—who thought that it was just ridiculous. Part of what I was saying in the article was that people still go to Starbucks and people still go to Barnes & Noble, and if we want to make school libraries more relevant, then maybe we should make them more like those places. And most of the concern that I got was, “Oh my goodness, how can we let students bring food into the library? That would be ridiculous. I would have to clean all the time.”
Why do you have such strong feelings about your school library?
My mom is the president of the school board, so I went with her to the preview of our recently expanded school. [After the renovations], school board members were saying, “Show us the library! We want to see the expansions on the library!” And I thought, “Man, I can’t believe they expanded the library. The kids aren’t even gonna notice.” Sure it looks different, but the kids are never in there. It just broke my heart to see that we wasted money expanding the library.
Do your friends go to the school library?
My friends are the ones shopping at Barnes & Noble, because they don’t think that the library has anything for them.
Do you have any recommendations?
I got an email from one librarian, who said that her school library is open two days a week after school in the evenings. They also do a coffee shop thing in there. They had other things, like if a student has missed a day of class and missed a test, [the library has people there] to administer the test for them. [Students] could also come in the evenings after practice. They just seemed like really good ideas.
Have you spoken to your school librarian, Robin Goodale, since your article came out?
I heard that she was really upset by it. So I went into her office and talked to her about it for a long time. And she invited me to go with her to a selection process for books. Even though they let a few kids pick out books that they like, I felt like they should have a request list so that kids aren’t going out and buying books themselves. And then we can put up a list that says, “Look what’s in the library this week.”
What would you like to see your school library look like?
I really wish we could have a coffee shop atmosphere, but I realize that seems impossible to them right now. And I’d like to see a display case outside the library that tells what new books we have, or a request list where students can write what books they’d like to see in the library. Also, we have a lot of blocks on our computers, so we can’t get to MySpace or our Yahoo! email accounts any more. So if you were going to have the computers open for student use before and after school, some of those blocks would need to be taken down.
