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School Media Specialist

Kathy Popp CMLE Extended Mini Grant Report

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kids testing the floor chairs
kids testing the floor chairs

This is a guest post from Kathy Popp, Elementary Media Center Para at Royalton Elementary School.

Thank you, Thank you, CMLE for the $1,000 grant. With the grant I was able to purchase child friendly seating for the Media Center.

I purchased bean bag chairs and grab & go chairs. Both will be easy to clean and store. The seating came just as I was wrapping up the last week of “I Love to Read” month.

The students are so excited to be able to have some unique seating to place around the Media Center while they are reading. It is so nice to have something besides adult chairs for the students to use.

The past few years more classrooms are giving students the opportunity to try different seating and now I can offer options in the Media Center also! This seating will last for years! 

Thank you again. Kathy Popp, Media Center Para at Royalton Elementary School. 

Books, Resources, School Media Specialist

Kari Green Extended Mini Grant Report

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This is a guest post from Kari Green, Media Specialist at Monticello Middle and High Schools.

The Monticello High School library has been sorely neglected for years after the library media specialist position was eliminated. Even though it is a newly remodeled space, the full-time paraprofessional has no library training and is employed under the IT department; checking out books is a courtesy rather than a job requirement. My (nearly) full-time library media specialist position at Monticello Middle School has slowly evolved to meet different needs. Because of this, I am teaching fewer media classes and have more availability to act as a “consultant” to the high school for a couple of hours per week. 

When I began to look at the foundational pieces of the library, I discovered that the library catalog had been completely deleted after the last inventory. There were 1,700 missing books, and utter disarray of policies and procedures.

Once I got a handle on the foundational tasks, I began looking at collection development needs. You can imagine what I found! Huge swaths of essential reading were either lost, missing, or never purchased. 

I turned to my Follett representative and asked for a list of “core” high school purchases – the type of purchases districts make when building a library from scratch. The list that was sent contained $169,000 worth of titles that are not available in the high school library. Wowza!

From this list, I selected the 51 most popular titles. These ranged from essential classics such as To Kill a Mockingbird and the Outsiders to newer titles such as Seraphina and Before the Ever After. My goal was to create a solid foundation to (hopefully) built upon in future years. 

Since the yearly budget is $1,500, the grant from Central Minnesota Library Exchange is a significant boost. With the help of the grant, the collection is moving in the right direction. Monticello Schools is grateful for the support! Thank you!

School Media Specialist

Sara Martini Extended Mini Grant Report

This is a guest post from Sara Martini, Media Specialist at Westwood Elementary in St. Cloud.

Last spring, I was given a grant by CMLE to spend $1,000.00 to purchase books to increase the diversity in our PAKRAT (Partners and Kids Reading Alot Together) program at Westwood Elementary School in St. Cloud. 

This grant was so exciting to receive, and I was able to purchase 160 new books in which every student in our school can see themselves represented in the books they can pick out to take home to share with their families. 

Our families at Westwood have read almost 8,000 books this school year as part of our PAKRAT program! In fact, one student told me that her mom told her to thank me for having so many girls wearing hijabs in the books we were sending home.  Representation matters!  Thank you so much!

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Brian Krause at Melrose Public Schools Extended Mini Grant Report

This is a guest post from Brian Krause, Media/Technology Integrationist at Melrose Area Public Schools.

The Melrose Area Public Schools would like to thank the Central Minnesota Library Exchange for its generosity in granting us a Mini Grant for this school year!

This is my first year working in this school district so it took me a while to realize what books we had and where there might be some areas to improve.

One day I decided to read a Choose Your Own Adventure book to several groups of students and the kids really enjoyed it. Many were asking if we had more, but unfortunately once we checked we found out that we did not. Through this grant we were able to purchase several different series of Choose Your Own Adventure books and they have been flying off the shelves!

The students really enjoy the chance to make decisions to see where the story goes and to see the different outcomes that might happen. We now have an entire section of shelves filled with Choose Your Own Adventure books; or they would be filled if so many weren’t checked out!

Besides purchasing Choose Your Own Adventure books, this grant also allowed us to improve two other sections of our library – Graphic Novels and several brand new series we didn’t have.

Graphic Novels are very popular among students here like I’m sure they are everywhere, but there were several incomplete series that now we were able to fill out, and there were several other book series on student’s wishlists that we were now able to purchase.

For our youngest readers we were able to purchase many books from three popular series that we didn’t have – Otis, Splat the Cat, and There Was An Old Lady.

Thanks again for your generosity! Our students have really enjoyed the new books. It’s always fun to see how so many student faces light up when they find out there are new books on the shelves.

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Lauren Kunde at Albany Area Secondary School Extended Mini Grant Report

This is a guest post from Lauren Kunde, Instructional Tech/Media Specialist & District Assessment Coordinator at Albany Area Secondary School.

As we made our way through the first few months of the school year, I started finding ways we could bring our Media Center back to life. While our fiction section is well loved and frequented by many, our non-fiction was seriously outdated and overwhelming.

Near the end of the weeding process, there was a moment of panic. Approximately 40% of our collection had been taken out of circulation for a myriad of valid reasons. However, this made the process of updating feel daunting. We could spend our budget about 14 different ways each year.

I didn’t know how to justify spending the bulk of it on non-fiction when our students are so hungry for fiction. And I also didn’t know how to justify not updating our non-fiction section. It could breathe life into our collection and encourage students to use it for their courses. 

The mini-grant from CMLE made this task far less daunting. We were suddenly able to purchase books that would reflect current and historical events from diverse perspectives, fill in many of the holes we had noted during the weeding process, and get non-fiction that was fun to read.

In total, we were able to purchase 82 books, which has truthfully changed our collection. They are geared towards students of varied reading levels and interest levels. No longer are the days of a non-fiction section with dusty books stuffed haphazardly onto the shelves in the corner of the library.

A huge thank you to CMLE for the opportunity to do this for our students!