Your Stories and Testemonials
One of the goals of the A+ Partnership is to help connect school and public librarians who serve the same teen population. To make it easy, we're providing contact lists (so you can quickly determine your local school/public counterpart) and suggested talking points for an initial conversation to discuss partnerships.
If you've made contact with your school/public counterpart, tell us how it went. Drop Pete and email at bromberg[at]sjrlc.org or post to the A+ Listserv. Will post your stories here and to the A+ Blog
Your Stories
Over the past few years, I have communicated with the YA librarians at Cherry Hill Public Library. Today, I cannot tell you who made the first call, but I do know that first conversation between the school and public librarian is very important. The communication door must be opened if we are to address the goal of provided needed library services to our middle school student population.
As a result of our first contacts, we did organize a few activities.
One year, the library director came to our school to promote signing up for a library card. We were able to briefly promote the services of both libraries during our Back to School Nights. I promoted the teen programs that were being held at the Cherry Hill Public Library on bulletin boards and during our live broadcast morning announcements.
Last spring, the YA librarian came to our school and made a live announcement about the summer programs that would be held at the Cherry Hill Public Library. We viewed all of these activities as win/win events.
Lisa Katz, one of the YA librarians at Cherry Hill Public Library and I were able to attend the A+ workshop on August 14th, but we didn't get a chance to talk about what we were learning about collaboration because Lisa had to return to the library before the day was over. As a result of what we learned during the workshop, we both knew that we wanted to expand how we were collaborating. Lisa returned to Cherry Hill and shared what she had heard with Betsy Wasiak and Michelle Yeager. We had a very brief unplanned conversation when I visited the library during the summer. In the fall, we met to plan a few activities that we believe take us to a win/win/win situation. Both libraries will be winners and our students will be winners.
This month, Michelle and Betsy will be coming to Rosa to conduct "Chat 'n Chew" sessions - lunch time book talks - with the students. They are able to do this because the lunch hour is not a busy time in the YA section of the library. Our Language Arts teachers are really working in partnership with me to promote independent reading. We have been using a "humor" theme, and Betsy and Michelle will book talk high interest books that they have in their collection, but we do not have in ours.
Our next major activity will be taking our 250 seventh grade students to the Cherry Hill Public Library during the school day to do research for information literacy projects that are centered on personal interests.
We will be taking 50 students at a time. Again, the public library collection matches the information need for many of these projects better than ours. My principal was able to obtain bus transportation for us. We are working on the details for these visits because we want to have the students prepared before the trip, we want them to be successful, and we want them to have a positive experience.
I will report back on these activities after they occur. As librarians, we are personally energized as we design these new programs. I know that we feel that we are "winners" because we are working together, and we know that our students will be "winners" as they experience the wonderful resources and programs that are available to them at the public library. We thank SJRLC for giving us the opportunity to jointly meet to share and brainstorm ideas and programs that will benefit our students. It all starts with that first call. I encourage you to use one of the talking points to open the door of communication.
Pat Collins, Gloucester County Library System
Last fall Clearview High School Librarian Jackie Gould and English teacher Michael Porter invited me to do a book talk for two honors junior classes. I had met some of the authors of the Printz awards at the ALA Conference in June, so I put together a PowerPoint and spoke about those books. It went pretty well so I guess I’ll begin reading the new winners and prepare another program to offer to the local high schools.
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