Schools to bolster library collections

Charleston County students and teachers should have access to more and newer books in their school libraries beginning this fall.

The school board gave the go ahead last year to infuse the district's media centers with $2 million in new books, and the board recently signed off on a plan to distribute the money among schools so the books can be ordered.

Each school will receive a portion of the $2 million, and the goal is for every school library to be at a proficient level, the second-highest state rating.

"Hopefully, it will get a lot of kids who haven't been excited about books excited about them," said Donna Whitlock, who's worked as a media specialist at Wando High School for three decades and has spent the past five months researching the books she plans to order.

Students, even struggling readers, are far more interested in new copies of books than older ones, and Whitlock hoped the new books would spur more children to read.

Media centers typically get short shrift in terms of funding, said Connie Dopierala, the district's coordinator for media services. The state doesn't set aside money annually for libraries, so the responsibility of updating collections falls on districts.

Martha Alewine, the state department consultant for school libraries, said the only district other than Charleston that has done a similar in-depth evaluation of its libraries and invested in improving them was Greenville County. Charleston will be in the top 1 percent of districts in the state that "have done some serious work with its collection to make a concerted effort to bring it up to date," she said.

Although media centers can be easy target areas to trim during difficult budget decisions and it's hard to see an immediate return on investing in them, Alewine said, research has shown that student achievement improves anywhere from 10 percent to 18 percent when students have free and open access to school libraries with up-to-date resources aligned with the school's curriculum.

The state doesn't have requirements for the quality of school media centers, but it does have recommendations for them. In Charleston, more than 40 percent of the district's libraries had the worst possible rating from the state under those guidelines, and the average age of its collections was 17 years old.

District officials proposed a $2 million plan to address the problem, and the board agreed to support it. The board also signed on to spend $2.2 million per year for the next five years on technology improvements for media centers, such as Smartboards, computers, printers and broadcast production equipment, and the board has started to authorize those purchases.

Charleston school leaders spent the past year deciding how to divide the $2 million for new books among schools, and media specialists spent months "weeding" their collections by pulling the books that no longer met state guidelines for their age.

Some schools boosted their rating simply by removing the old books, but others needed more books. Wando High, for example, had only about five books per student while the state guidelines require 10. The school received $140,000 and plans to buy about 3,000 books. Media specialists were asked to solicit feedback from students and staff, and each school had the latitude of ordering whatever books it wanted. The only district stipulations were that the preponderance of the list should be nonfiction and support the school's curriculum.

About $1.1 million will go directly to schools, and the remaining money will buy electronic and reference materials for each school. Every school will receive a brand new set of encyclopedias, dictionaries and thesauri, and each school will have access to online fiction, nonfiction and reference systems that can be used with Smartboards or on students' home computers.

Schools have started to place their orders for the new books, and most should receive their books by the time school starts.

"When they come back in August, they're really going to flip," Dopierala said.