Category Archives: Guest Blogger

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

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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.

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CMLE Mini Grant: Stearns History Museum Family History Conference

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 Steve Penick, archivist at Stearns History Museum.

Family History Conference Mini Grant; Stearns History Museum, St. Cloud, Minnesota

The Family History Conference:  Growing for Generations was held on September 19, 2020 cohosted by the Stearns History Museum and the St. Cloud Area Genealogists.  Originally scheduled for last April, the arrival of Covid-19 postponed our program that lead to the decision in holding a virtual conference.

Thanks to the Central Minnesota Library Exchange, the $300 Mini Grant paid for our keynote presenter Kim Ashford and one breakout speaker.  Fifty-seven attendees enjoyed 12 different sessions on various topics.  They included:  ethnic topics, research road trips, online sources, using social media for genealogy, newspaper research, digitizing, and strategies in writing your family story.  Afterward, attendees communicated their experiences about the quality programming, and for the most part, limited technical issues throughout the day.  Yea!

An online format provided some advantages for those attending the conference.  Most sessions were recorded, offering the flexibility for attendees to view them for a limited time afterward. While an in-person conference offers opportunities for socializing and networking, participants had chances to meet and greet before sessions began or during lunchtime.  Speaking of lunch, several online exhibits rotated through the noon hour slideshow highlighting our two organizations and the work that they do.  

We look forward to our next conference whether it be virtual or in-person.  Until then, keep researching!

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CMLE Guest Post: Join Me in Building Inclusive Collections

Guest Post by Jenny Hill, Ed.D. St. Cloud State University

I was recently reading a book about library media centers where the question was posed: When you walk into a media center, who does space the belong to, the media specialist, or the students (Wools & Coatney, 2018)? 

This is a convicting question and that makes me stop and think.  Media specialists may be the program administrators, but space needs to belong to the kids!  

That leads me to another question: who are our students?

As demographics continue to shift in our schools, I find that the 1990 work of Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, often referred to as “the mother of multicultural literature,” still rings true today.  In her classic essay, Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors, Dr. Bishop outlines the need for kids to have access to books that reflect who they are; mirrors; provide perspective into another’s world: windows; and provide a way for students to enter into another’s context: sliding glass doors.

Twitter seems to be echoing this idea in 2020 with hashtags such as #WeNeedDiverseBooks  #DiverseReads and #OwnVoices.

We all want to develop inclusive collections, but how can this be accomplished?

School Library Journal is hosting a series of webinars this fall called Equity in Action: Building Diverse Collections.  There are three parts being held virtually on Tuesday, October 20th, Tuesday, October 27th, and Tuesday, November 10th which include topics such as:

  • What is a diverse and inclusive collection?
  • Collection Management Strategies to Enact Change at Your Library
  • Equity Work Is a Marathon, Not a Sprint
  • Conducting a Diversity Audit of Your Collections
  • Stereotypes, Tropes, and Cultural Appropriation: A Collection Development Deep Dive

Registration costs about $300 and self-paced options online are available if you cannot attend the live sessions.  More registration information can be found here.

If you do decide to attend, I would love to connect with you throughout the process and beyond to see if we can work together to implement some of the strategies presented so you can build a more inclusive collection in your schools. E-mail me at: jchill@stcloudstate.edu

References:

Reading Rockets. (2020).  A video interview with Rudine Sims Bishop, Ph. D.  https://www.readingrockets.org/teaching/experts/rudine-sims-bishop

Woolls, B. & Coatney, S. (2018).  The school library media manager. 6th ed. Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited.