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September/October 2006

AASL Community Column
The NSLMPY Award: May I Gush?

Sara Kelly Johns

Since this was a "bumper crop" year for applications, the committee was faced with a wealth of good choices. We read, scored, scored again, and read again. We discussed results with the other committee members at Midwinter, online and in a very long conference call. The committee’s work was arduous and exacting, but we kept in mind how much work went into each school’s completed application. To quote Chair Gail Dickinson’s final report: "After one hour-long conference call, 167 e-mails, and 10 days of travel, the committee concluded its deliberations." The Hilliard (Ohio) City School District, Biblioteca Las Americas in Mercedes, Texas, and Kapolei (Hawaii) High School received this year’s awards   in New Orleans at the AASL Awards Luncheon. 

NSLMPY – What’s that? (pronounced "SLIM-PY," the N is silent)

What qualities set the winners apart?

Besides clear connections to the principles of Information Power, the strongest single characteristic of this year’s winners is that they are all student-centered. Each has worked hard to create a space that belongs to students, a space that meets both their intellectual and social needs. That doesn’t happen without commitment—by the staff to long-range planning, by the teachers to exemplary genuine research experiences for their students and by the administration to provide the resources and people needed to "do it right."

A close-second quality is the recognition of school library media specialists as curriculum and instructional leaders. Administration, fellow teachers, and students acknowledge that role, and we were provided with examples of the ways in which they depend on the school library media program as the central focus of teaching and learning in the school.

A sense of involvement in the local community is also evident in the applications of NSLMPY winners. The populations that shape the programs of all three winners have high levels of diversity. The schools and their libraries take very seriously their efforts to raise reading levels and student achievement. No wonder their libraries are well-staffed, well-funded and are flexibly scheduled! It’s a "formula" for success.

What does it look like onsite?

Hillard, Ohio 

In the Hilliard school district, when the district chose the Understanding by Design® framework as its instructional model, it was library media specialists who were trained to be the instructional consultants and curriculum leaders for the schools. We saw that in action on our visit. New teachers coming into the district go through an Induction Week that includes learning how to partner with library media specialists to design high quality learning experiences for their students. The district’s library media program has created its own course of study, Powerful Partnership: An Integrated Approach to Informational Literacy for Classroom Teachers and Media Specialists that specifies what students need to know to be literate in information, media and technology; these skills are woven into the school’s curriculum. Hilliard has just revised Powerful Partnerships to align with the recently adopted Ohio Library Standards

Kapolei, Oahu, Hawaii 

The Kapolei High School  was created to service the new Kapolei community resulting from rapid industrial and population growth. A Charette process involving 49 community members established the vision, mission and the curriculum of the school. Form followed function and the facility was designed around a team teaching and smaller learning community environment. Kapolei High School practices project-based learning strategies throughout all courses while integrating different subjects and functioning within a team/academy situation. With eight different academies to choose from, students also are challenged to incorporate PBL while pursuing rigorous coursework supporting their chosen area of interest or career pathway.

Students as well as the staff know that the Library Media Center is crucial to their success. When a student focus group was asked by Chair Gail Dickinson to answer a hypothetical question, "What would you do if a reduction in funding closed the door of your library?" one student promptly answered "We couldn’t do PBL!"

Kapolei’s library media center staff not only collaborates with teachers to plan meaningful "PBL" experiences but Carolyn and Sandy also are the school’s professional development leaders. They have created a plan for developing sound learning experiences referred to as "The Cookbook." Teachers refer to it as the "bible" as they create their units; it is used as a teaching tool for the ins and outs of PBL.

The committee’s favorite saying learned in Hawaii was: "You don’t eat till you’re full, you eat till you’re tired." Kapolei’s students and staff don’t settle for "good-enough" learning experiences, they strive for excellence.

The Library Media Center finds ways of serving all students’ needs from providing books for students to own through an ongoing book fair, to laminating and binding student projects, to raising fish for the tenth grade ecosystem project. (There will be about 500 students participating in this project next year. With an average of 3 fish each, they have a lot of fish to raise!)

Ninth grade students in Leo Zen's English classes are reading (and so is Mr. Zen). Students read 15 minutes per day in each of their four classes. An hour of reading in school every day makes a difference for Kapolei's test scores!

Their print collection has been carefully developed since 2000 to support curriculum that reflects the unique local culture of Hawaii. We heard testimonials from administrators, state education department personnel, library media educators (Dr. Violet Harada, keynote speaker at AASL’s Fall Forum on assessment, had lunch with us) and current and former students. A former student, now a college student studying broadcast journalism, came back to tell us how important the library was to her achievements. Students away in a state competition left projects that included library research for us to see. They all wanted us to know how important the library is to their work.  (Read more about Kapolei in the October 2006 issue of Cable in the Classroom.)

Mercedes, Texas

In Mercedes, TX, eleven miles from the Mexican border, Biblioteca Las Americas (BLA), a library program in an independent school district, supports two schools. It is in its own 33,000 square foot building with a lecture hall, an art-filled foyer and an orange grove along one wall of windows. The library can serve over 300 students. In a recent e-mail to me, Lead Librarian Lucy Hansen said: "…I love the building. But I love the people we work with more (our dear, dear staff, wonderful students, and bright teachers, and so, so supportive administrators). And, it's way more than the building--it's what happens inside the building and also outside the building, due to the connections among students, teachers, and librarians."

BLA serves both Med High whose students do internships in clinical locations and Science Academy whose seniors have a senior project that involves solving a real-world problem. Many students do not have technology available at home and spend hours on the bus getting to their clinicals as well as to school. BLA eases the schedule by being open till 7pm on weekdays, and welcoming community members to use their resources. The result is students and parents often using the library at the same time.

Students take advantage of the library's before-school hours to use its resources.

BLA Floorplan

Studying in the stacks with orange groves behind them.

The library’s print and electronic collection is chock-full of sophisticated science and technology resources to support the curricula of the schools, 150 magazines and tempting recreational reading. Students and staff are given technology and information literacy instruction by the library staff; having the technology staff on site makes it easier to be effective. Their staff includes a student staff member who teaches video editing.

BLA’s students have the opportunity to participate in an outstanding peer tutor project, ¡VIVA! (Vital Information for a Virtual Age) that is supported by a National Library of Medicine $100,000 grant. Students learn to help peers and community members raise their health information literacy and, especially, to use MedlinePlus , a free reliable source of medical advice. In a summer institute, the peer tutors learn presentation skills, make learning objects, create lesson plans for the school year, and conduct outreach activities that continue during the school year.

What can the rest of us do?

The winning schools of this year’s NSLMPY awards are deliberate in their support of the mission of their school or district. They also carefully consider how their programs meet the Information Power standards, national and state standards. They assess and reflect and look for ways to be leaders in curriculum development and integration. We can do that.

The NSLMPY application is a good instrument for program evaluation and applying for it can be a long-term goal to improve our programs, even if we don’t win. Recently, I overheard a Pennsylvania school librarian say that her school, after being turned down for her state’s equivalent award, used the result to push the district to improve their program. Her explanation came as she was holding the plaque for winning this year, several years later. We can do that, too.

The Hilliard School District’s school libraries, the Kapolei High School Library and the Biblioteca Las Americas are exemplary…and so are many, many other school library programs. We can take the NSLMPY application and apply ourselves, or use the application to evaluate our programs and create a plan that could eventually add a certain handcrafted crystal obelisk to our own libraries’ decor. The winners will be our students.

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Sara Kelly Johns is a library media specialist at Lake Placid Middle/High School in Lake Placid, N.Y., Associate Editor for Knowledge Quest and AASL president-elect