I love School Library Month. It gives me an excuse to brag about - oh I mean, advocate for -  school libraries. I'm in a small school district so I include my building administration, superintendent, and school board in my packet-of-goodies style campaign. Here's what they receive:

I've included two. The one I will send this year is about my state's libraries in particular. The one I sent last year was more general.

My building administration will also receive a thank you card and an infographic highlighting circulation, activities, collaborations, and outreach events we have put on this school year. For them only, I am including a short wishlist along with reasoning of what the library needs to continue progressing. The first items I will be requesting are an additional staff member and the reupholstering of our bench seating. The other item won't cost money (continued encouragement of teachers to collaborate with the library).

School Library Month is the perfect time for getting others on your team and taking stock. Look back. Look ahead. Aim. Fire!

Of course it's that time of year. We're all re-girding our loins to make the second semester of the 19-20 school year our best yet. We're revitalized. We're...
overwhelmed?
lost?
maybe perfectly on track?
Each school librarian is having a different experience.

I'm all of the above. After my awesome library aide left to pursue other career opportunities (she is doing great, by the way!), my services cut way back. I had to do her job and mine. Plus, there were some services we were only able to offer because she is bilingual. So I started break feeling like a library loser.

​I ordered this book and waited for it to come in during the holiday hullabaloo. "School Librarian's Career Planner" didn't fix everything. About half of the book was aimed towards points in my career I had already passed, so I only glanced at them. This would be an amazing read for someone considering library as a career or still attending library school. I got something really great out of it though. Five fresh ideas to suite my new role! (I'll let you know how they pan out in future posts.) I also got confirmation of what I was working out in my brain already: it's time to prioritize instead of whining, complaining, and pushing for another aide. It's time to look at what I can do all by myself again, not berate myself for what the dreams WERE vs. where the library is right now, and really decide what is worth my energy. I'm realizing my energy is finite - at least right now - and I need to be honest with myself and my program about what is the most important. It all matters. It's not all the best thing for right this second.

So no matter where you are in your career, this is a nice read. It isn't a fix-it book. It's not packed with lists of ideas. I purchased my copy used from Amazon for only $14, and it's likely I'll only read it this once. I plan on giving my copy to the library program I graduated from to see if they can pass it off to an interested student.

During Banned Books Week, of all weeks, I received the first irate parent phone call of my library career. This involved father was already psyched up because his boy had taken a photo of a book on display at the library and sent it to his dad. That book - "Yay! You're Gay! Now what?". He had some very passionate concerns and an expectation for how our conversation was going to go. I hate to say it: he was angry. He was pushy. He had very strong feelings and very strong words. However, it is important to note that he was NOT disrespectful in any way.
I asked the basic questions: what book was it? What were his concerns?
And then I just listened. For about 20 minutes. Until he had everything out. 
Then I acknowledged him, his concerns, and his involvement in his son's life. I explained our selection policy and what had lead to this particular book being selected. I made sure he knew his son wasn't required to read it, but it was available if he chose to. Then I told him about our challenge procedure. I offered to make the appropriate copies of paperwork and policies and leave them in the front office for him. I offered for him to read the book on school grounds - assuring him that it was very short and could be read in an hour or two. (Our policy says school copies of challenged materials cannot leave the grounds until the challenge is completed.) I made sure he knew that he wasn't obligated to go through the process if he read the material and no longer felt it should be removed from the shelves, but that the process would need to be adhered to if he truly wanted it removed.

An amazing thing happened. To this dad's credit, he calmed down. He really listened. He still didn't agree with it personally, but he ultimately decided the things we were discussing were a satisfying answer. The phone call ended amiably - with me offering to talk to him about it any time and to pull the necessary paperwork and material if he should ever choose to use them.

Then I hung up the phone and immediately began shaking. My aide, bless her heart, came over and let me pour some things out. I grabbed the book and the policies and paperwork and immediately headed for the principal's office. I briefed him, and he chose to keep and read the book in case the parent came to see him about it. My principal was impressed with the phone call and how I handled it.

I went back to the library and drafted an email to two of my best library buddies and former professors. Never would I have been able to handle that phone call without focusing on defending the actual book had they not drilled it into my head to make great selections with plenty of evidence why that book should be there AND don't defend the book - defend the process.

So, my library friends, it's going to happen at some point. It happened to me even in my small town! The best advice I can possibly give is: stay calm, be respectful, and defend the process. If you do not have your selection criteria or process in your library policy, make that happen! Also, if you do not have a challenge process in place, get it going. The ALA has a great webpage that I used to create ours. I also looked up school libraries that had those policies and borrowed their ideas and processes.

I first came to know the Hate Has No Home Here organization when I was in library school. The library goddess (as she is affectionally known around these parts) had a few posters in a stack. I couldn't grab one fast enough. My school was just beginning to receive refugees. While we are a high immigration community, the refugees were not of cultures to which we were accustomed. I loved showing that the library is a place without hate, and the sign was pretty.

The sign was up in the window for two years before I decided it was time to take it one step further. The library purchased a 1 inch  button maker, printed off sheets of graphics from the No Hate website, and invited almost every student we saw for two weeks to make buttons. They did! Then, they came back and made more. We saw the buttons popping up at other schools in our district. Our kids were passing them on to family and friends! 

I saw the movement spread. Pride in who they are and consideration for how others were treated made for a student body I am incredibly proud of. A safe space and a tiny button helped them put into words something that was important to them.

As kids tend to do, one kid was too rough with our button maker, and I had to remove it to see if my husband could fix it. Students were incredibly bummed when the button maker wasn't available any more. They asked on a daily basis if my husband was able to fix it. (Spoiler alert: he was after a couple of weeks and new parts!) However, we decided that we shouldn't leave it unattended by a library worker anymore.

Please check out Hate Has No Home Here. They're a wonderful organization, and all of their graphics are freely available for printing.

Banned Books Week is a cause close to my heart. Like many librarians, I may not agree with your choices, but I will fight for your rights to freedom of speech, religion, reading whatever you want, etc. This year's theme was particularly good. 

I seized this opportunity to do a breakout about censorship and banned books that two English teachers took advantage of over the course of three school days. The library was full of awe, shock, and that positive vibrancy that we librarians crave. 

We were also allowed to take over the school's loudspeaker during morning announcements and run a contest for homerooms (called Focus at my school). We explained what banned books week is and read a quote each day from a different banned book. (It actually worked out that our English classes were all reading banned books or had already completed them that week so we focused on books they had read for our quotes.) The first class to call with the correct book title the quote was from won for the day. Small prizes were delivered. One class won two days so they got a bigger prize the second time. Let me tell you, our phones were frantically ringing as soon as the Pledge of Allegiance was done. After we had a winner, we posted the quote and book to our library social media sites along with the daily winner.

The weirdest thing we received permission to do was to turn all of the lights off in the library for one full school day with the exception of one light - representing the theme. We had signs everywhere showing that we were open. By the time the afternoon sun shone in the windows, you couldn't even tell the lights were out. However, it lead to great discussions with our staff and students about banning books and censorship.

National Library Card Sign-Up Month.

I saw it on a calendar, and my heart skipped a beat. It was my chance to finally really collaborate with my public library in a meaningful way! My students love free wi-fi and the new teen space at our public library is something to behold. Our students even painted the mural occupying the giant wall during the library's construction. If there was ever a time to invite the PL crew over, it was National Library Card Sign-Up Month!

Via email, we quickly drafted a plan: the public library would come during all lunches on every Wednesday in September. My library advertised it to the school starting during the beginning of the school year Open House and never let up. We lit up social media. We were plastered on the tvs throughout the school. We had posters! We were in the announcements.

And I don't think a single student signed up for a library card.

Why? Well, one reason is that the vast majority of our students couldn't sign up without their parents, and parents weren't taking off of work in the middle of the day to come sign up for library cards.

Another reason: the students felt the public library was invading the school library's turf. I was shocked! I said we'd planned it together and the school library had advertised it. But since I proctored classes during lunch time and I wasn't sitting WITH the PL crew, students assumed things.

I wish this could be a different story. A tale of reaching the masses of students and every one walking out with a plastic library card in hand. It's not true.

We did do some powerful things. We put the public library into the heads of the students. We showed a bridge between school and the real world. We demonstrated that different libraries co-exist without it becoming a war between the Greasers and Socs. So, we'll keep trying with new ideas in the future.

For the record, our PL crew was amazing to work with. I am so proud to have them serving our community.

Oh, back to school season!

It's a great jolt to the school library's summer laziness when all the students return and suddenly circulation is back in full swing. I love it! Everything is at its best.
Students are polite and kind.
Teachers are polite and kind.
LIBRARIANS are polite and kind.
Enthusiasm peeks around every corner. No one cares if you have a box of books that hasn't arrived yet or if the library shelves aren't just so. We're all on our best summer sun-kissed behavior.

This year marks a lot of "let's try it" initiatives for me and my school library. The first to demonstrate immediate positive results is introducing book walks/book passes/book speed dating.

What a great opportunity to have nearly every student in the school come through the library right away! Teachers were on board to try a book pass instead of the "regular" checkout experience of turning the children completely lose like a pack of feral wolves and hoping they made good choices. The library was excited to establish the library's three expectations - effort, listen, and no put downs -  and get some new and old books in front of so many faces.

​You know the scene: tables of carefully curated books. Ours were separated by interest and tailored to the teacher bringing students in and their purpose. Fortunately, our teachers are great at planning in advance so we were able to switch books on a period to period basis with our fully loaded waiting book carts.

Students saw books they may never have seen otherwise, tried new things, and honed their personal reading tastes. They also saw a library staffed with people who care and listen to them. They saw adults working together to support their success.

Was it perfect? No. In fact, we had a student loudly proclaim that he hates reading choose to fill out his log rating all books a 0, with no interest, no appropriate vocabulary, no stamina, and no fluency. But, he DID fill out the entire log, so he put his hands on many more books than the students actually studying each book to answer all of the questions. We're counting it a small victory. The log we had students use was from 

Very few things cause a fluttering in my heart and paper cuts between my fingers like "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. I remember when I first discovered them in a local bookstore. My parents took us on a rare trip - it's dangerous to lead an addict straight to the object of their addictions - and they had given us a strict budget. Looking back, it was likely $5 because paperbacks have always been an affordable option. That would have gotten me 2 books back in the day! (It was the 80's for anyone curious.) 
I perused the shelves, walked right past The Baby-sitter's Club (which would become a later obsession), selected a Girl Talk book called "The New You", and stood in front of the Choose Your Own Adventure display trying to make the impossible decision of which one would come home with me. I remember racking my brain to see if I could remember which ones were already available to me at the school and public libraries. I had to pick just. the. right. one.

So when an author contacted me with the subject line "Want to help revive a genre?" and it turned out to be a grown adult version of CYOA, I could not reply fast enough. "The Friar's Lantern" by Greg Hickey was everything I hoped it would be and more. He treats the readers like the adults we are but also takes great care to keep with the CYOA tropes we all know and love. I found myself going back, just as I did with the books as a child, to certain decisions and going the other direction to see what would have befallen my character. I was pleased with my fantastic original decision that lead to my character winning a million dollars. Within this fun format, some real issues are discussed: grief, power of the mind, murder, and ethics of psychological experiments to name a few.
I highly recommend this book for anyone missing the CYOA nostalgia in your life but finding the originals now a bit unsatisfying. Who knows? You may win a million dollars!

How long has it been since I was really, genuinely bursting with excitement over a YA book?

Let me tell you: it's been awhile.

I don't know what clicked SO MUCH with "A Danger to Herself and Others" by Alicia Sheinmel, but it did. Could it be that I was reading in the middle of the night when I couldn't sleep? Sure. But it comes down to the fact that it gave me a lot of thoughts and feelings as a reader. Isn't that the whole point of reading?

I love the unreliable narrator aspect - and I've rarely seen it executed this well. Hannah is very easy for me to connect and sympathize with. She has a lot of anxiety and coping mechanisms in place throughout the book that honestly seem pretty reasonable. Counting steps? Sure. Not hurting anyone by counting steps. I think that's why I was so blown away by the book. We see everything through Hannah's perspective and she's a worthy narrator.

The masterful storytelling is something that has me really excited to share "A Danger to Herself and Others" with my readers. April Henry fans will devour this book. Heck, I would read it again! (And I'm known for NOT re-reading books.) It's suspenseful, nothing comes out of left field without justification, and just...beautiful. Beautifully written. 

Finally, that ending... I wanted to pull Hannah to me and hug her myself. Her parents were so distant and aloof that I could barely stand it. The author doesn't cave to my need to know Hannah is going to be alright. She lets it dangle in front of me without succumbing to the trend to put a pretty bow on every ending - especially when dealing with mental illness. I am thrilled that this book is in my library's collection and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

I don't know Dave, the man who said the text above, but I feel him. I know my colleagues feel him as well. 

My knowledge of the five love languages is pretty normal. I read the original book for marriages plus the one for teens. I think the main challenge in the workplace one is isolation. It takes a lot to figure out your co-workers' love languages unless your whole workplace does the inventory and shares the results (which, honestly, my personality prefers BIG TIME). The authors do give you signs to start working out the love language of those around you, but I don't know. I prefer it directly from them. 

While I found some nuggets that were worth the read, I didn't really LEARN all that much from this book. I loved the initial chapters where all of the data was. (Surprise!) Once speculation began, I didn't feel it was as valuable. I liked a few of the examples - even highlighted 2 of them to share with a specific co-worker. Framing compliments as "One of the things I admire about you is...", "I wish I were more... (like them)", and being detailed and specific were all great pieces of advice. 

I would recommend this to any supervisor of any kind in any field. Appreciation only means so much coming from a coworker. It tends to mean more the higher up the ladder that it comes from. However, if you're like me and searching for ways to show your colleagues that you appreciate them, it's worth a flip through - even if you have to resist the urge to make all of them take the inventory so you just know their language.