IL School District Requires Library Cards Too

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By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 04/06/2010

Pencils, notebooks, and markers are fairly standard supplies that most schools ask for each fall. But a library card? In Illinois’s School District U-46, elementary students need to check that off their list, too.

“Schools are not opened year-round, but public libraries have a wealth of material,” says José Torres, the district’s superintendent who starting asking all of its elementary students to sign-up in October 2008, and plans to keep the tradition alive going forward. “Public libraries serve the families, not just the students.”

The Bartlett Public Library District.

Torres originally launched the Library Card Challenge with all 41,000 students in the district, including middle and high school students in the fall of 2008—but had a better response from the younger crowd. A pizza party went to the school that had 100 percent of its student body sign up, and schools had different contests to gets kids excited from dances that required a library card to get in to mock elections, where students had to flash their card to vote.

The Bartlett Public Library District, just one district that benefited from the drive, noticed its patron usage increasing in recent years, but saw a bump of 318 percent with 627 new cards issued when the elementary school challenge took place in October 2008, and a 50.2 percent increase, with 446 new cards issued when U-46 ran its high school challenge in January and February 2010.
“It’s so great that a large school district makes a push like that,” says Susan Westgate, assistant director for Bartlett Public Library District. “It affects more people.”

Public libraries have seen numbers increasing across the country—partly an effect of the recession as patrons drop expensive Internet services at home and come to the library to use free connected computers, and also as families look for more affordable entertainment for the children, such as free story hours and even movie screenings.


The Bartlett Public Library's Teen Corner.

Westgate says that many teens, especially, those who signed up for library cards during the last two drives, were particularly surprised by what the Bartlett Public Library has to offer.

“We have a teen corner with manga comics, graphic novels, and posters from Twilight,” says Westgate. “They would come in and say, ‘Gosh you have computers? And video games to check out?’ I think they were expecting a globe and a large dictionary. But they see all that, and say ‘Wow.’”

As for U-46, Torres says that they won’t hold a Library Card Challenge again, but instead just make library cards a requirement for all elementary students—and in that way, as they matriculate, ensure all kids have a card starting from kindergarten and on.

“We now have 10,000 students who did not have library cards before,” he says. “The response has been overwhelming.”