All posts by cmleguestblogger

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Check it Out:, School Media Specialist

Annie Allen Extended Mini Grant Report

This is a guest post from Annie Allen, Media Specialist at Rogers Middle School. Read more about our Extended Mini Grant Program or fill out one of our applications. This program is only available during the FY21 school year.

I was awarded an $800 CMLE Extended Mini Grant to purchase ebooks for our middle school students. Getting books into the hands of our students has been a challenge during Distance Learning. Students and parents are not able to easily pick up print books at the school, so expanding our ebook collection was a priority. With a limited budget, ebooks have not been something I’ve really been able to expand access to. This mini grant allowed me to purchase 108 new ebooks for our students!

Of these, 81 of the titles ordered were able to be shared across our secondary schools through MackinVIA, the platform we use for our digital content. This means that not only are these books impacting access for my 700 students here at Rogers Middle School, but thousands of students across our district! All of the titles purchased are perpetual ownership, which means our students will be able to enjoy access forever!

Historically, ebook circulation has been low at my middle school. Our students really prefer print books, but with Distance Learning ebooks became some of the only books easily accessible for students. With most of our access being those from the EbooksMN collection, I wanted to purchase some additional titles with strong middle school appeal, specifically fiction novels.

I purchased the new ebooks in late December, and they were ready and available for students when they returned from winter break. I heavily promoted the new books the first two weeks back to school, posting on Schoology, creating featured book content in MackinVIA, and sending out a video for our ELA teachers to show to students. These efforts paid off!

Last year during the same time frame (Jan 1-Jan 31, 2020) there were only 38 total logins to MackinVIA and 0 views and 0 checkouts of ebooks. This year between January 1 and January 31, 2021 there were 1,972 logins to MackinVIA, 1,080 ebook views and 12 ebook checkouts! January 2021 ebook usage exceeded TOTAL usage of ebooks from March 2020-June 2020 when we moved to Distance Learning for the first time (109 ebook views, 2 checkouts)! February has seen continued usage due to I Love to Read Month promotional activities (again featuring the new ebooks) and a virtual book tasting with 6th grade ELA classes. Through February 23rd, there have been 555 views of ebooks and 12 checkouts. This is encouraging since more than 90% of our students are now back in-person 4 days per week. 

Having the additional ebooks for our students will be a game changer for the rest of this school year and into the future. Our students who have remained in Distance Learning will continue to have easy access to our expanded ebook collection in addition to those attending school in-person. The titles purchased are newly published, old favorites, or titles in our book club collection which means they will have broad appeal for a while. I am excited to use our ebook collection for a summer reading promotion since our students will have continued access over the summer months!

Check it Out:

Carolyn Bauer Extended Mini Grant Report

This is a guest post from Carolyn Bauer, Media Paraprofessional, at Albertville Primary Library. Read more about our Extended Mini Grant Program or fill out one of our applications. This program is only available during the FY21 school year.

Receiving this grant from CMLE was a huge surprise! The process was so painless that I thought for sure that I was doing something wrong! I was like a small child on Christmas morning when I got the exciting email telling me that our school received the grant! 

I hopped onto Amazon and proceeded to pick out a bunch of fairy tales for our library as we were lacking in the classics and I also picked out a complete library of “The Little Spot” books for our Teacher Resource section to help them with some of the students during these trying times. Both the Spot collection and the fairy tales have been circulated a few times already!

This was such an easy process and I would encourage any library to apply for this grant! Thank you very much to CMLE!

CMLE, Guest Blogger

Michelle Buettner Extended Mini Grant Report

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This is a guest post from Michelle Buettner, librarian at St. John’s Area School in Foley, MN. Read more about our Extended Mini Grant Program or fill out one of our applications. This program is only available during the FY21 school year.

St. John’s Area School is a small rural school community in Foley, MN. The school has 74 students in Kindergarten through Grade 6, along with 14 faculty and staff.

St. John’s Area School is very thankful to the CMLE Minigrant Program. Without the Minigrant, I would not have been able to replace more than 150 books that were damaged in our school library.

In the middle of October 2020, a second floor pump valve broke on our school’s boiler system. This breakage caused gallons and gallons of a water/oil mixture to leak through the ceiling down into the library, soaking and damaging several shelves of books, and worst of all, closing down the school library for about three weeks to clean up the mess. The students were very disappointed to have the library closed for that long.

Once the library was opened back up, they were sad that many of their favorite books were no longer available because they were damaged. I talked to the students about which books and series they would like to see replaced and added in our library.

Thanks to the CMLE Minigrant Program, and generous donations by several families and individuals in our school and community, I was able to replace every book that was damaged. I was also able fulfill many of the students’ requests and purchase books to complete several series.  Many of the new books that were ordered came in just before Christmas and during Christmas break. The students were not able to see the new books until the middle of January due to Christmas break and two weeks of distance learning (due to COVID-19 health concerns).

Once the children returned, each class came to the library that first week back and the students were very excited when they saw all the new books waiting for them to check out!

Thank you CMLE!

Michelle Buettner
Librarian
St. John’s Area School

Check it Out:, Guest Blogger

CMLE Mini Grant Report: Equity in Action: Building Diverse Collections

Huyck, David and Sarah Park Dahlen. (2019 June 19). Diversity in Children’s Books 2018. sarahpark.com blog. Created in consultation with Edith Campbell, Molly Beth Griffin, K. T. Horning, Debbie Reese, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, and Madeline Tyner, with statistics compiled by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison: https://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/literature-resources/ccbc-diversity-statistics/books-by-about-poc-fnn/. Retrieved from https://readingspark.wordpress.com/2019/06/19/picture-this-diversity-in-childrens-books-2018-infographic/. 

Do you need help funding a project or materials for your school library this year? Check out our Extended Mini Grant Program!

This is a guest post from Jenny Hill, Ed.D. Assistant Professor of Teacher Development (Library Media emphasis) at St. Cloud State University.

Is your school library collection equitable and inclusive?  How do you really know?  Thanks to a generous grant from CMLE, I was able to attend the Library Journal/School Library Journal’s Equity in Action: Building Diverse Collections Workshop in order to learn more about how to perform an equity audit.

As topics were introduced at the beginning of the workshop, there were many great resources provided, some of which were TED talks and articles written by authors about diversity that I’d like to pass along to you:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story

Grace Lin: The Mirrors and Windows of Your Child’s Bookshelf

Jacqueline Woodson: Who Can Tell My Story

When performing an equity audit on your collection, it’s good to get a handle on the demographics of your community around you.  I found this site particularly helpful because of its detail for the specific cities throughout the state of Minnesota: http://www.mncompass.org/profiles

With your audience in mind, you can begin to audit your collection to see if it is representative of your population.  There are many ways to approach this task; there are a few things to keep in mind:

Start with a portion of your collection, maybe even a reading list of selected titles.  Trying to audit the entire library is a herculean task.   Remember the words of Mark Twain, “The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.”

Stand on the shoulders of giants!  There are many practitioners in the field who have already started to engage with this work.  Shannon McClintock Miller recently hosted a webinar featuring Baltimore County Public Schools and Denver Public Schools. They willingly share their equity audit tool they’ve created using Google Sheets.

Use the information you discover from your audit to inform your future purchases.  There are many great places to look for books for your collections, especially those that feature #OwnVoices.  Here are just a few to get you started:

Lee & Low Books

The Brown Bookshelf
Rainbow Booklist

Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association

If you are interested in learning more about the equity audit process or if I could help you start to diversify your collection, I would love to sit down and talk to you further! You can e-mail me at: jchill@stcloudstate.edu

Guest Blogger

CMLE Mini Grant: Purchasing Inclusive Books for Rockford Middle School Center for Environmental Studies

CMLE mini grant logo

Note from CMLE: We are currently in the process of updating our mini grant policies and procedures. We will make an announcement on our site and newsletter when we are ready to begin reviewing applications again!

This is a guest post from Beth Russell, Digital Skills Teacher and Curriculum Integration Coordinator at Rockford Middle School Center for Environmental Studies.

This summer saw a call for social justice that was shouted from the rooftops, marched down the streets, and written on signs, blogs, and across the hearts and minds of people in Minnesota and across the globe. We heard people demanding the right to exist, to succeed, and to matter. At RMS-CES, we heard this call and are responding in part by recognizing that our school library did not reflect the voices, faces, and stories of many of our students. 

We searched for book lists that featured writers of color, showcased diverse characters, and told stories and experiences from the past and from the present. We looked for books about everyday life and ones about traumatic experiences in history. We read blogs, followed authors on social media, and vowed to do better when purchasing books in the future, that our students will see themselves on the cover and in the pages of the books that are on our shelves. 

After the books came in, teachers who were in the building during workshop week had the chance to browse and borrow books for class read alouds. It was great to see so many teachers excited about starting to share our new collection right away, and we can’t wait to get our books into the hands of our students at the start of this very unprecedented year.