the big house library

the big house library was the proud recipient of a generous PEF grant this year! :)

ms. vanessa hauswald (casa's awesome senior english teacher and senior project coordiator) and ms. erin fender (casa's former assistant principal and small learning communities coordinator) and i co-authored the application to bring more better newer reference books into the library especially for senior projects and SLCs.

the petaluma educational foundation found ours to be a worthy cause and gave us some serious cash to buy books with! :)
 

 
we decided to go with salem press because we already had their series magill's medical guide and weapons and warfare, and seniors were using the heck out of them on HCP and STE senior research papers, both in print and in the accompanying ebook that came free with it (available on the stuff casa pays for page of this website). so i thought, why not get more of the same?

because salem press (and our fabulous rep marvin) quoted us such great prices, we were able to get a lot of bang for our grant's buck. here's we purchased:

* the encyclopedia of american immigration
* the encyclopedia of global warming
* the historical encyclopedia of american business
* salem health: cancer
* salem health genetics

while that probably doesn't sound like a lot, trust me, it is! these books are thousands of pages long each! and, again, we also got the ebooks, which you can search on the stuff casa pays for page. and we'll be getting more books by salem press later this summer.

so, thanks again, to our friends at PEF and salem press for supporting casa's students and their library. have we told you lately that we love you? :)

[click here to see these photos on flickr]
  

You'll never guess who I hung out with the Big House Library yesterday!  

Dr. Stephen Krashen! :)

Dr. Krashen a professor emeritus at the University of Southern California, author of numerous books about literacy and reading, advocate for libraries, and a personal hero of mine! :)

I gave him the ten cent tour and showed him my smutty magazines (he was impressed) and our new computer lab (he wasn't impressed). 

We talked about Race to the Top and his most recent research on how school libraries positively impact student achievement.

I am so inspired by Dr. Krashen's relentless advocacy for reading. I am so grateful for his defense of libraries. And I am so honored to count him as a mentor and a friend. :)
 

 
I presented this Animoto on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at the Petaluma City Schools District Office to our library-loving Superintendent Greta Vigue and her Advisory Council -- made up of one teacher representative from each school in the district.

Petaluma High School's teacher-librarian, Connie Williams, and I toured the committee members through our library websites and collaborative teacher projects. We talked about the Governor's initiative to move toward electronic textbooks -- something I strongly support and coincidentally just mentioned to my principal Linda Scheele and tech committee chair Tom Kinney today. And we asked about the possibility of unblocking social networking site Facebook in schools -- something I'm not so sure about yet (as you know, I am not a social networker). (The Superintendent said that she is working on a plan for that with Eileen Rohan, Director of Educational Services, and Mike Cole, Director of Business Technology.)

Connie and I offered to lead a professional development session for district teachers about the Big 6 information literacy model and/or a workshop for adult education students and parents a la the Classroom Learning 2.0 program. Though school librarians already do so much, these days there's more than ever to do, and we are happy to do whatever we can.  :)

One of the teacher reps lamented the fact that Petaluma's elementary schools no longer have any credentialed teacher-librarians at all. But we pointed out how lucky Petaluma is to have what we do have:

• 4 secondary school libraries that are open full-time
• 4 credentialed teacher-librarians who work full-time in just 1 school each 
• 2 full-time library assistants, 1 at each high school (I love you, Miss Helen!)  :)
• an inter-library loan program that give students access to materials at 4 schools instead of from just their own
  
• a voter-backed parcel tax that supports school libraries  with a very healthy budget every year from now  until perpetuity (I love you, Measure C!)  :)

Though Petaluma's school libraries are well loved and well supported, who knows what the future holds. Our neighbors to the north in Santa Rosa are basically eliminating their school library programs because of budget cuts (read that story here and read Connie Williams' response to it here).

Hopefully the adoption of State School Library Standards by California's Superintendent of Schools Jack O'Connell (read that story here) will keep some districts from shutting their school library doors for good. But should it come to that, maybe Petaluma parents will fight for us the way Orange County families protested on behalf of their school libraries and the way Oregon moms got almost militant about saving their school librarians.  :)

Petaluma understands the importance of strong school libraries.  Research shows that strong school libraries have a positive, observable, measurable impact on students' academic achievement (just look at all the data from the California Department of Education and the data from 16 other states!).

Strong school libraries DO make a difference -- especially here in Petaluma.  :)