by Kym Kramer, May 2020

Wanted for the 2019-2020 School Year: Fourth and fifth grade students to volunteer one recess a week to work in the school library. Duties consist of check-in and check-out of resources; shelving resources; organizing and alerting patrons with books on hold; and helping track overdue materials. Bonus opportunities include designing and directing two annual book fairs; conceptualizing, organizing, and running the annual library fundraiser; and making purchasing recommendations for the collection complete with first-dibs rights.

The Junior Librarians at my elementary schools truly ran the clerical side of my library programs. They were responsible for all check-in, 90-95% of the shelving, and circulation desk duties during their shift or when their classes visited the library.

Each year I explained during our first "staff meeting" that they, the Junior Librarians, were responsible for the heartbeat of the school library. If it weren't for them, the circulation and lending aspects of the program would grind to a halt. Without them, the culture of the library program would be about the adults in the school, not about the students. My job, as the certified school librarian in an open-access, flexibly collaborative program was to teach.

And guess what? Books were not checked in at the start of each day—and the programs still flourished for ten years. Students might not have returned their books before they were allowed to check out another book—and the programs still flourished. Some students lost books and weren't kept from checking out more materials—and the program still flourished. Students knew the circulation override password—and the program still flourished! In fact, I will insist that it flourished because of these things, not despite them. So how did this work?

It All Starts with Dewey…Just not Melvil

I'm a pretty unabashed Dewey-ist, or Dewey-ite, or whatever you want to call an educator who believes everyone in the (school) community will contribute to the greater good. The research-based term for this is pragmatism. Pragmatists, like me and John Dewey, believe each person's work becomes an invaluable part of the bigger picture. And, with each person's effort, a culture of teamwork and empowerment grows. Members know that without their contributions, the entire community is weakened. I have been lucky enough to work for several principals, most of whom believed this too, or at least were flummoxed enough by the process that they got out of the way and let us roll.

Duties

Each school year started with a survey on the second day of school to my fifth-grade students assessing who wanted to return to their jobs in the library. These veterans were asked to become trainers for the new crop of fourth and fifth graders, and in turn, they would graduate to become the Reservists; the daily student helpers who managed the book holds.

I completed their train-the-trainer program by the seventh day of school, and in the meantime I amassed applications, complete with a letter of recommendation, from the annual crop of new applicants. (My biggest teams were between thirty and forty kids in a school of six hundred, and my smallest team was twenty.) This would translate to four to eight Junior Librarians working any given day during their thirty-minute recess. It's amazing how much eight sets of hands working for thirty minutes on focused tasks can accomplish!

Typically three to six trainers allowed me to split the crop of applicants into small cohorts, usually about three to six kids per trainer, while I might have a couple training teams if the overall applicant pool was large. Each applicant received a letter from me the second week of the school year telling them who their trainer was and which eight recesses they needed to come to training for the next three weeks. Yep, we did a total of eight trainings and a written test to be part of the Junior Librarians. I typically had two to four teams training on any given day, trying hard not to schedule kids to miss more than a couple recesses a week. That daily commitment for four weeks on my part and that of the Junior Librarians paid dividends for the library program for the next eight months of the year!

Training

The junior trainers taught almost everything: check-in, checkout, shelving fiction, shelving special collections, location of all materials, assisting patrons with using the OPAC, and good customer service. I was the only trainer who taught shelving nonfiction. That means every kid had a professional trainer for decimals in nonfiction, and ultimately I tested them to see who would be able to handle these sections. Libraries don't work well if you can't find the materials!

The final two days of training all the trainers had a five-day weekend, and I conducted two very important days of training with all the recruits still in the pool. (Perhaps surprisingly, this was always almost every single kid who signed up three-and-a-half weeks prior!) On "Notes Day," I introduced what I considered a critical part of the job: student privacy and library ethics. Students were told there was only one thing that would get them fired: accessing student records either for their own curiosity or because someone asked them. We dissected the Library Bill of Rights and I explained that we are not the Library Police. We aren't in the business of telling people what they can and cannot check out. We also provide a collection that represents the whole school community. There might be materials they don't agree with personally, but we do not censor our collection with our own biases. I'm hopeful, if they remember nothing else about being a Junior Librarian when they are adults, they will remember the service, equity in access, and privacy tenets libraries uphold for their communities.

On the last day of training, the recruits took a five-page test. It included everything from our library policies to identifying sections of the library on a map to putting items properly on a virtual shelf in several sections of the library. The final two questions were: Who do you want to work with on your team? and Is there anyone you cannot work with on your team? I found out early on students are never productive when the work environment includes mortal enemies.

Each year, on the day after Labor Day—approximately thirty-two school days after we launched, the program was up and spinning. Teams and schedules were posted in the lunchroom as well in their classrooms. Junior Librarians showed up and signed-in for their weekly shifts and spent fifteen minutes shelving in their assigned section and fifteen minutes working as a team on circulation check-in and sorting. Efficiency increased steadily as people shelved in the same section that they proved they understood. High-traffic sections like the 598s and graphic novels might have several shelvers a week, while low-traffic sections might only get shelved once a week. The trainers were taught how to access and manage the holds, complete with creating and delivering the holds notices to classes as well as keeping the holds moving when kids forgot to pick them up! All in all, the entire clerical aspect of the program transitioned to the Junior Librarians by the start of the second month of school.

Just Deserts

My students were not given shift incentives to conduct their work. No candy bowl. No stickers. But, there were employment rewards. In addition to my Junior Librarians, the school had other community worker programs. All told, about 130 kids in the school held "jobs" any given year. Our school functioned on trimesters, so once a trimester, we held a large Job Corps celebration. Like many jobs, to earn the privilege of participating in the celebration, the students had to be reliable, effective workers. My Junior Librarians could not miss more than two shifts per trimester. They were granted two "passes," just like our "personal days," no questions asked. Past that, they were forfeiting their celebration slot. These celebrations became the not-to-be-missed events like cookouts, after-school field days, hay rides, skating parties, and the annual sleep-over. Who doesn't dream of sleeping in the school at some point?!

Bonus Opportunities

Additional perks included opportunities to plan and guide school-wide activities like two book fairs and a carnival. The Junior Librarians were the sole organizers of a winter games carnival that typically pulled in well over $1,500 in profits. The kids selected the theme, invented and created games for the attendees, wrote and performed all marketing, created flyers and newsletters, and volunteered for one hour during the event. We used the profits to supplement our Run for the Arts fundraiser, and together the physical education teacher, and I funded artist residencies for each grade level each year. These residencies translated to large-scale collaborative integration opportunities for me.

Annually, Junior Librarians received a short training on book selection principles, and we traveled to a local bookstore where they read and recommended titles, and purchased trending paperbacks. I will never forget the year they loved Simms Taback's Joseph Had a Little Overcoat months before it won a Caldecott Honor, when I had been on the fence about it prior to our trip!

Once a trimester, volunteers from the crew would help me conduct the Trimester Clean-Up. In four hours, for the cost of Hot Flamin' Cheetos, pizza, pop, and good music blasting through the library, we would work together to get everything ready for vacations. From shelving every item left on the carts, to thoroughly sanitizing every surface. At the close of the evening, I could go into a break knowing the library was ready for business the first day we returned!

Works Cited

American Library Association. "Library Bill of Rights." American Library Association, 1996. http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill.

Dewey, John. Democracy and Education by John Dewey: With a Critical Introduction by Patricia H. Hinchey. Myers Education Press, 2018.

Dewey, John. Experience and Education. Reprint ed., Free Press, 1997.