The Coloma Public Library has teamed up with Coloma Community Schools to help connect high school students with new books.
Library community outreach supervisor Erica Anstey tells us she and the library’s assistant director, Alicia Ford, are now heading to the high school every other Monday to set up a sort of portable library that students can peruse during their lunch period. Anstey says the library is always looking for ways to reach more people, and high schoolers are a group that gets missed.
“We know that high school students have really busy schedules and coming to the library as a teenager isn’t always a realistic thing, so we started thinking about how we could bring the library directly to them,” Anstey said.
Anstey and Ford set up shop
Anstey and Ford set up shop at the high school for the first time on Monday with an estimated couple of hundred books on hand. Ford says they tried to get a wide variety of titles that would be relevant to teen readers.
“We’re trying to do a large variety from every genre,” Ford said. “We just had our very first session yesterday, so it’s kind of our trial time of picking. But we did from popular nonfiction, quite a few graphic novels because that is huge, like manga and graphic novels are huge at our library with the teen population. And then we went heavily on fiction, but more of print things kind of new to the library within the last few years.”
Coloma Community Schools Superintendent David Ehlers says when the library approached the school district with this idea, he saw an opportunity to provide a service to the students that they’re not currently getting.
We used to have media specialists at all
“We used to have media specialists at all our grade levels, and now we only have them K through five,” Ehlers said. “In our middle school, we stock a lot of classroom sets of books and library for the kids, and they just take them as they go and bring them back, or they may not. But our high school kids, for about five, six years now, have not had access to current literature. And even then, it was just about what these ladies are doing they bring in these books that the kids might be interested in and take requests, and they can check them out…So it’s a service we couldn’t provide any longer to our kids. And so we were excited to partner with them for that.”
Ford says the first day went well.
“We had quite a few interactions, sometimes about just things in the library, whether people checked out or not,” Ford said. “They came up wanting to know why we were there and what the books were doing there. And I think one person asked Erica if she had to have a library card to come to the library in order to study and do her homework. And we’re like, no. So it kind of just opened up some new conversations with teams that we didn’t see. So we were very happy for the first time going.”
Anstey says this new partnership is about more than bringing books into the school. She says it’s about building connections, encouraging a love of reading, and making sure students have convenient access to the re
Ehlers says there are several benefits that could come out of the partnership.
I think the need is there, Ehlers said
“I think the need is there,” Ehlers said. “From my perspective, there’s a push, a little bit of push in education to get kids off digital devices and back reading books and magazines and things like that. So this is just a perfect storm at the right time to try to help us make that switch and fill a gap in a service we can’t provide.”
With a strong start this week, Ehlers says maybe the partnership can grow and the library can starting working with the district’s English teachers on new programs. Anstey tells us heading into the new school year, librarians from Coloma Public Library will be available to students the 1st and 3rd Mondays of each month.
1 Comment