The Beebe (AR) Public School District is committed to the mission of utilizing all resources to provide learning opportunities, tools, progressive technology, and guidance to enable all students to become productive citizens and lifelong learners. Each school year, upon returning from summer vacation, a noticeable decline in student reading levels…

How can relationship building and demonstrating impact on learning be done? As professionals, school librarians must seek out opportunities to lead or work with others in the area of programming. Much can be done in the library space but when the programs occur outside the school library, a librarian's willingness to be adaptable is leveraged and…

Students look to their school library to find new books, seek information, creatively solve problems, and use technology. School libraries play an essential role in students' academic growth and development of lifelong learning skills. All of the wonderful resources and services that school libraries provide are easily accessible to the population…

Sometimes great initiatives in education start with just a glimmer of an idea and a belief that building a foundation under that idea can effect change. That glimmer of an idea came to Bandera Independent School District (BISD) from a middle school English teacher who attended an International Reading Association Conference and heard about…

This article describes the author's (an elementary school librarian) journey as she researched various bike bookmobile programs in the United States. Though the three programs had different target audiences, all the bike bookmobiles that she observed generated excitement and interest in reading. Public interest for each program was high. People…

Important happenings related to the concept of intellectual freedom (IF) coincide with the annual back-to-school ramp up. This article discusses how to use the summer hiatus to develop learning opportunities related to events such as Banned Books Week (BBW) and Banned Websites Awareness Day (BWAD). The author provides resource information to aid…

Summer drift, otherwise known as loss of reading comprehension skills or reading achievement, has been a well-known and well-documented phenomenon of public education for decades. Studies from the late twentieth century to the present have demonstrated a slowdown in summer drift attributed to specific summer reading programs addressing motivation…

This article presents a story of the transformation of summer reading at Barnstable High School (BHS) in Massachusetts which took place during the last year of the author's practice as a school library media specialist before she began her work as a professor and researcher at Rutgers University. It is a true story about effecting change and…

A library renovation class was offered to special education and low-income high school students during the summer, including lessons in Dewey Decimal classification, equipment repair and cleaning, and library organization and research skills. Students helped to plan and implement renovation of their school library media center. (MES)

Describes a high school summer reading program that was developed to encourage a lifelong habit of reading for pleasure by assembling a booklist of fiction and nonfiction titles, each sponsored by an administrator or teacher who then led a discussion of that book in the fall. (LRW)