Last week, we announced that James Patterson will donate $1.25 million to school libraries this year in the first-ever partnership of its kind! He's partnering with Scholastic Reading Club, and we'll be matching each dollar with Reading Club “Bonus Points,” which teachers can use to acquire books and other materials for their classrooms, at every school that receives an award. School libraries can be nominated for a donation here:www.scholastic.com/pattersonpartnership.
In celebration of school libraries, we went straight to the source and asked top librarians and academics about why saving school libraries is so important.
Today, we speak with speak with School Library Journal’s "Never Ending Search" blogger and library sciences professor Joyce Valenza.
Q: What makes school libraries so important for kids?
Joyce Valenza: If I were a kid today I would live in my library. It would be my preferred third space.
School libraries are the largest classroom in our schools. We are participatory centers for formal and informal learning. We are also havens, often the only truly safe spaces in the school. Every day, we welcome, and greet by name, all students across grade levels and disciplines. We know their passions and interests, as well as their curricular needs.
Working with classroom teacher partners, we ensure that our kids become information and media literate citizens, able to leverage the tools of their time to ensure that kids are able to read, inquire, analyze, synthesize, communicate and publish with talent and agility across media and platforms. Teacher librarians curate digital content and lead in the thoughtful integration of digital tools for our learning communities.
More kitchen than grocery store, more transformational than transactional--libraries are places to invent, create, make stuff, collaborate on stuff, and to share stuff. My colleagues and I work to ensure that all students have equitable physical and intellectual access to the resources they need to learn, grow and create.
Q: Is there a favorite memory you can share about your own school library growing up?
JV: That’s a funny question. I didn’t have a strong school library program, but I wish I did. I would have lived there. I fell in love with my public library, and my public librarians, and became a library page there as soon as I was sixteen.
Q: If you could say one thing to the school librarians of the world, what would it be?
JV: May I say three? Keep up the good fight; your work is stickier than you may think. Decisions are made by those who show up. Make all your decisions with the best interests of children in mind.
Q: You write a ton! Do you have time to read for pleasure and if so, what sorts of books do you read?
JV: Right now I travel a lot back and forth from New Jersey to Pennsylvania. I have an audiobook going ALL the time. I listen to a variety of adult interest bestsellers and I am catching up with books I realized I missed after the announcement of the Youth Media Awards.
Q: What's on your mind?
JV: Equity. This one word drives me. In Philadelphia, students have virtually no libraries in their public schools. A few blocks across the border in the suburbs, where I worked for so many years, and in many private schools, students learn with a rich toolkit of resources--subscription databases filled with magazines, scholarly journals, ebooks and media designed to meet their curricular needs. They have the opportunity to discover and select books and stories, in all their glorious traditional and emerging formats, from a carefully developed collection. They have librarians who work with their classroom teachers to ensure they leave 12th grade with the skill set they need for success. This is not a fair competition. When you cut a library program from a school you cut its inquiry, reading and learning cultures. All kids deserve school libraries staffed with well-trained school librarians.
Thanks, Joyce!
Joyce Valenza
