What could be better than having a someone know all about the things you like to read, curate books for you and deliver them to your very own personalized book locker at school?
That’s exactly what Erin Pierce and her library staff is doing for children in the Woodland Hills School District of Pittsburgh.
Erin is the librarian at the C.C. Mellor Memorial Library, serving Braddock, Churchill, Edgewood, Forest Hills and Wilkins Township.
Thanks to the library, every student in the Woodland Hills School District receives a public library card as a part of the school registration process.
A full-time staff member of C.C. Mellor spends more than 50 hours/week in the schools, providing direct programming to more than 400 classrooms yearly, ensuring that students’ public library cards are integrated into their daily lives and school experience.
With pilot funding from The Grable Foundation, the library and the school districts have created a seamless, secure delivery system that has been in place since last October. Students and faculty at the high school can request materials from the library, to be delivered directly to the school via book lockers. This has alleviated the last major barrier to students’ accessing public library materials: transportation. Funded by Grable, the lockers are managed by the library’s full-time staff member, who manages the book delivery service and maintains the remote lockers, ensuring that students have convenient, ongoing access to library materials.
Within the first few months of the program, approximately 80 students used the lockers. In just a short time, the library anticipates up to 40 % of the high school student body – roughly 400 students – using the service within the next few years, as library staff spreads the word and shows the student body how the lockers work.
Woodland Hills teachers and staff can use the lockers, too.
According to Kevin McGuire, library media specialist for Woodland Hills, the locker system “significantly reduces barriers to access: students can borrow and return materials without needing transportation beyond getting to school. It opens up an entire world of resources. While my high school library houses approximately 10,000 titles, students are no longer limited by what we have on our shelves. If we don’t own a book they want, they can easily request it through the public library.”
What’s been popular? Lately among novels and grade-level appropriate literature, students are requesting hobbyist books about sewing, board games and other resources that expand active learning. He said their library also does not offer video games or an extensive “Library of Things” like the Carnegie Library does, so students frequently request items such as Xbox and PlayStation games.
Efforts like these are especially critical in light of recent data showing that nationally, roughly one-third of high school seniors can’t read at basic proficiency levels. According to data from last year’s Keystone Exams, Woodland Hills mirrors this, with 33.1 percent of 11th graders scoring below basic and trends suggest plummeting reading scores among students, and growing shares of kids who “rarely or never” read for fun.
According to Erin, “having a staff member integrated into schools to bring public library services directly into the school system has been transformative to the success of these efforts. We hired a FT outreach person, and have other staff members from each of the 3 libraries that serve the district providing coordinated outreach. This far exceeds the collaborative efforts of any other public school/public libraries that I am aware of.”
