This is a guest post from Steve Kline, Media Specialist at South Junior High School. Read more about our Extended Mini Grant Program.

Covid has impacted our students in many ways. Many opportunities and resources have been taken from or denied them in the past few years. The CMLE grant gave South Jr. High an excellent opportunity to leverage our District 742 1:1 program (in our case, Chromebooks) and gave students access to a wonderful resource, a subscription to the Comics Plus tool from Mackin.

Using their Chromebooks and the subscription purchased with the CMLE grant dollars, students now have unlimited, simultaneous access to thousands of graphic novels, manga, and comics all vetted and appropriate to their age level.

Distance learning substantially changed and impacted the way libraries operated and continues to influence how we work with and are being asked to serve our patrons. Whatever your opinion on digital resources is and the value they have, the need to build and provide access to digital libraries became more immediately pressing and happened on a much grander scale because of the immediate need distance learning created.

Digital libraries gave us the opportunity to provide resources to students remotely via their 1:1 device. Unfortunately, developing and maintaining a digital collection is expensive. Comics Plus allows us to provide high interest materials to students in a one-stop solution. Kids are excited when they see what is available to them. Better yet, they don’t have to wait until material or resources is returned – they can check out any resource in the collection at any time.

So, I want to thank CMLE for their mini-grant program. The grant allows us to fund our subscription to Comics Plus for another year. That is another year students will be able to access new and different resources that our library would not be able to purchase or provide. Thank you from the staff and students at South Jr. High in St. Cloud.