Library Year in Review 2022-23

In June of last school year I created my first “Library Year in Review” that outlines all the great happenings in our school library for the year. I got the idea from Cathy MacKechnie at Nepean High School who creates one for her library every year. Following her lead, I sent ours to all the teachers at our school, the parent-school council, our admin team (Ps & VPs), our superintendent, plus a few more folks. While I received some nice feedback on it from a few teachers, I was disappointed not to hear anything from our admin team or superintendent, especially given the great things that happened in our library despite being given 0$ in budget for the year! I will still absolutely do this again this school year and I thought it might be worth sharing here on the blog as well:

Hi folks,

Thank-you to all of you that brought students and classes to the library this year. A little summary of our year here in the library to share . . . 

We now have an amazing “Thinking Classroom” space with lots of whiteboards and a new projector set up in seminar B to make it a true classroom space (thank-you Brian & José for the installs). Classes came to participate in workshops on:

• research skills
• student vote
• formal citations
• speed dating for books
• time management
• sketchnoting
• general introduction to our library space

These are the top 10 books checked out from our library this year. You’ll notice a trend; graphic novels & manga series are the biggest hits!

Since manga series can be costly to add to our collection, and with no library budget this year, we started an online wishlist that allows folks to purchase books for our library that have been requested by our students or determined to meet our goals of diversifying our collection to have more authors & characters that better reflect our student body. Our wishlist can be found here if you know of anyone who would be interested in donating to our library. We received a few donations already this year for which we are very thankful:

We implemented a new “free book” shelf outside the library doors where any student, staff or visiting community member can help themselves to free books to take home. These are books that are weeded from our collection because they haven’t been checked out in many years by our students, that we have more copies of than we require, or that are donated to the library but deemed not to fit the needs of our collection at this time. It’s been a popular attraction with books being taken home, and the shelf has been refreshed regularly all school year.

One of our big undertakings this year in partnership with Brittany Melia, the Teen Librarian at Greenboro – Ottawa Public Library, has been getting all of our students a public library card. We’ve handed out more than half of them so far with another batch still to come in. Students have told me this has been super helpful so far even just to access the members-only stronger wifi at their branch to download Mr. Lesser’s slide decks faster 😉 In September we’ll do the same for the incoming grade 9s & any new students. This means teachers can make use of the many online resources from OPL (like Curio, etc) as all students will now have the ability to login & access them.

We had our first author visit post-Covid! Local authors – one of whom is a Ridgemont parent – Alison Lister & ‘Nathan Burgoine spoke with our students about writing books for teens, healthy relationships and dealing with systemic biases and microaggressions on the daily. Students had great questions for these authors on some very important topics.

They also kindly donated many copies of their books as well as others from their publisher, Formac-Lorimer, to our library & students:

Finally, I’d like to call attention to a portion of a letter written by the OSSTF Library Subject Council (OCDSB Secondary Teacher-Librarians) to Michele Giroux, Director of Education, advocating on behalf of OCDSB Libraries with respect to the 2023-2027 Strategic Plan: 

“The Library Learning Commons can be a significant strategic player in addressing equity issues among students, because we are a central, welcoming, unstigmatized hub that all students use, regardless of economic or social factors.

However, many Library Learning Commons do not have adequate budgets or staffing to provide . . . a resource collection that can respond in a complete and up-to-date manner  to students’ needs, cultures, and identities.

Larger schools with larger budgets can provide expensive digital resources and help students develop skills for using them, whereas smaller and less affluent schools can not provide this access or this education.  . . . 

Furthermore, Library budgets should be protected and prioritized to ensure that students across the OCDSB are experiencing equitable access to resources.  There should be a per-student funding model, based on the Ministry allocation of Library funds that is designated directly for purchases within the Library Learning Commons at each school site.  A consistent funding model would allow for stable, long-range development in response to student needs at each school community level.”

Thanks for reading this far. Looking forward to new (& of course returning) students, new ideas & new partnerships next year with you all. Keep up the great work & see you in September.

– Laura Wheeler (Teacher @ Ridgemont High School, OCDSB; Ottawa, ON)