Plains Elementary School
Space and Physical Access
Plains Elementary School is located in Timberville, Virginia. This Title 1 school serves a rural, low income population. I have been a teacher at this school for 21 years. Plains has a very unique design. The school was built in 1971 with an open pod design. In the beginning there were no walls to separate the classrooms. There are now walls and doors for the classrooms. However, not for the library. Due to the ventilation system in the library area, walls cannot be installed. The bookshelves make three “walls” to enclose the area. The circulation desk constitutes part of the fourth “wall”. The library is in the center of the first floor. It is an open area where students and teachers constantly pass by as they make their way around the school. It can be noisy and hard for the librarian to keep the attention of students. The following pictures was taken during summer break when Boys and Girls Club was using the library. It is not a good representation of how the library looks during the school year, but it does show how it is an open area with no walls. The tiger painting is on the side of the circulation desk.
Students traveling through this part of the school walk between the brick wall and the book shelves shown in the above picture. During the school year, there are tables, student chairs, stools, and other comfy chairs. There is also a colorful animal rug that students can sit on. The library has a SmartBoard for librarian use and a self-checkout area for students.
Collections / Services / Intellectual Access
The collections in the library include fiction, nonfiction, picture books, graphic novels, references, and educational professional development materials. The nonfiction collection is organized using the Dewey Decimal System. The fiction collections are organized alphabetically by author’s last name. Books also include AR reading levels either inside the books or on the spines.
Technology is not used in the library other than the librarian using the SmartBoard. She shows videos or puts a book under the document camera and projects it onto the SmartBoard when reading it. Most of the lessons consist of a story and then worksheets or coloring.
Although it is not a collection for students to checkout, there is a portrait collection hanging in the library of diverse people who have made contributions to the world. It includes males, females and many races and nationalities. Our former principal had someone paint these. You can see some of the portraits in the picture above.
People – Patrons and Staff
This library serves students in grades prekindergarten through fifth grade as well as the teachers and staff of Plains Elementary School. The library staff includes one librarian and one full-time library assistant. Both are female. The librarian is white and the assistant is hispanic. The assistant has been at the school for over fifteen years. She has a great relationship with students and teachers. She also knows everything about how the library operates. The librarian has been at Plains for one year. She has no degree or experience in librarianship or teaching. She just began her first class this summer at Longwood University in the school librarianship program. Unfortunately, her inexperience is obvious. There are lots of complaints from the teachers and many of the students do not like library time or want to go. I really hate that the students feel this way and would love the opportunity to improve things.
Digital Access
The website is easy to navigate. The main page includes a picture of the library and multiple links to other pages. There is a link to the library catalog for searches. This search page also includes new books added to the library and topic icons. When you click on a topic icon, it shows books for that topic at the library and if they are checked out or are available. There are also links to put a book on hold, World Book Online and Storyline Online. The page for putting a book on hold includes a video explaining how to do this. The person in the video is not the current librarian of Plains. There is a link to the public library also. However, when I clicked on it, it didn’t work.
Another link from the main page is to AR Bookfinders. This allows students and parents to look up the reading level of books. On the AR Bookfinders page are also downloadable and printable bookmarks.
The main page also includes a way to increase the text size of the page and a link to google translate in order to translate the main page to another language. Unfortunately, the change in text size and language do not carry over to the catalog search or AR pages. There are also tabs to send an email to Plains, be put on the Plains information email list and links to Plains Elementary social media pages.
Final Take Away
According to the American Association of School Librarians (2018), two of the six beliefs at the core of libraries and librarians are “the school library is a unique and essential part of a learning community” and “qualified school librarians lead effective school libraries” (as cited in Rubin & Rubin, 2020, p. 122). This does not seem to be happening at Plains Elementary School. I hate to make that statement, because this is the school where I have taught for 21 years and I love my school. These core beliefs have been accomplished in the past and hopefully they will be again in the very near future. The students deserve that.
Reference
Rubin, R. E., & Rubin, R. G. (2020). Foundations of library and information science (5th ed.). ALA Neal-Schuman.
Thanks for this look into your school’s library! I especially enjoyed the paintings that a previous principal had painted. It’s too bad about the current librarian’s inexperience leading to such negative student experiences. Hopefully it will improve soon!
Thanks Tina for sharing your experience at your school. 21 years is quite the accomplishment! I am surprised your new librarian was able to get the position, is that common in your district, that teachers can get hired before they are credentialed? I just looked at a map where you are and it is much more rural, perhaps it is more challenging to fill positions in your area? I have two friends that work in Harrisonburg (one an elementary school librarian and the other a high school Spanish teacher). I hope things can improve in the library this next year so that students enjoy their time there. Good Luck!
Granted there are not a lot of librarian candidates, but many of us have the same question about how she got the position. Hopefully, it will improve for the students.
What an interesting and challenging space for a library. It’s too bad the librarian is in the position where she is underqualified. Unfortunately that seems like a problem that many schools will begin to face as there are not enough qualified librarians. Sounds like the library aide is a great asset.
The portrait collections is really cool, what great idea. The concept of a library just situated in an open space without walls seems very odd but at the same time it sounds like it’s very open and accessible to anyone just walking by so that’s a good thing. As I saw from my own school library visit, that can be a very intimidating job so hopefully the librarian there is able to find her footing and adjust to the position better, particularly now that she is taking some library classes.
That’s interesting reading about the assistant versus the librarian. Hopefully, since she is taking classes it will start to get better as time goes on. I wonder why they haired her…
It may be because it’s the summer but the library looks rather dark and not very inviting. It is also interesting that the only technology is a smart board for the librarians.
*hired
It usually looks a lot better. Because its summer things are boxed up. There is usually a big colorful rug on the floor and some colorful stools and chairs. We have a technology assistant and most of the technology is in his room. He has classes come to him and he does the tech lessons instead of the librarian.