"Brava to the 2019-20 Miller Fellows for all their work on our behalf this year. From blogs, Instagram, Animotos, traditions, new thoughts, hard topics, and new voices they ILLUMINATE the manuscript of our Wheeler community!" Laurie Flynn, Director of Strategic Communications
We have reached the end of another school year. This one has been extraordinary and in many ways underscores the reason for the librarians to write an annual account of our work with teachers and students. Can our influence be summarized by the last few months of distance learning? This environment does showcase our efforts to provide a true blended learning and online experience for our students and the journey to distance learning has highlighted our work in a way that is unprecedented. School Library Journal published a survey in April 2020 of school librarian experiences during this time of Distance Learning. The survey of 975 librarians reported: "About one-third of respondents said they’d been unprepared for their school’s closure because of COVID-19. Thirty-one percent said they’d received no notice prior to the shutdown orders, and 30 percent said they were not prepared for the shift to online distance learning." Our experience was very different. 
Team Library was able to pivot quickly to a digital response and active presence in a week! We were asked before spring break to prepare resource lists for families and faculty. Both included curated online resources from databases to science experiments, virtual museum tours, video tutorials, booklists and passwords. As soon as distance learning was announced we were ready to bring both resources and services online. Our collection development shifted from Follett to Overdrive for e-books and audiobooks and saw unprecedented numbers of new users and items circulated through this online book platform. We did our best work as a team with weekly meetings and goal setting that integrated us into the daily life of the "virtual" school.
"Thanks for creating and sharing all this great content - been really helpful and inspiring especially during distance learning." Beau Poppen, Hamilton Middle School Teacher
One of the best outcomes for us as a team of librarians was the time to work together in a way that was both unique and rewarding. We were able to speak with one voice about our goals and responsibilities to foster and demonstrate inclusion, equity, and diversity in our collections and our lives. We capitalized on our strengths to meet departmental goals and embrace the opportunity to lean in as technology integrationists, online storytellers, podcasters, senior interest group facilitators, and book club leaders to enhance virtual reading development. We moved well-loved independent reading initiatives and their culminating activities to online platforms that rewarded 4th grade Battle of the Books and 6th grade Quahog Cup readers with exciting digital challenges. Capitalizing on our access to social media we reinvigorated our blog "Ask Prescott" with twenty-four posts in a matter of two months!
"Awesome tutorial! Wow! Wheeler is so lucky to have you." Amy Bonnici, Upper School Spanish Teacher
Our team believes in professional development. The nature of our work requires that we actively engage with our library organizations such as the Rhode Island Library Association, Association of Independent School Librarians and the American Association of School Librarians. We attended conferences and webinars throughout this distance learning time to stay abreast of best practices for providing services during this time, (who doesn't love the school librarian who used a drone delivery service to get books to her students?) and procedures for safe re-opening.
Digging into technologies to deliver better lessons, create digital escape rooms with Google Forms, build waves with Wakelets, use Google Slide Hyperdocs to create interactive and self-paced lessons, and become expert on Padlet and Flipgrid filled our days. We found new exciting online mentors like Amanda Jones a fun and inspiring Middle School librarian who serves a school population of 700 5th and 6th graders in southeast Lousiana and her webinars called "Our Two Cents" and Sam Kary an amazing 5th-grade social studies teacher from San Franciso who shared his excellent online teaching strategies in his "New EdTech Classroom" videos. I personally watched, listened to, or tweeted with these two educators almost every day trying to build my own storehouse of tech knowledge to be able to better serve our students and teachers.
The last month of our distance learning experience brought an end and beginning to our work and clarified in the starkest way our responsibilities as librarians in a community of learners to own the work of anti-racism, through diversity, inclusion, and equity. Intellectualizing our response to the death of George Floyd through discussions and efforts to build a collection that is representative and includes Black, Indigenous, and people of color did not meet the urgency of the moment. Even now with our efforts to share pivotal texts and media that changed our thinking we want to do more, to help students: "read books to arm yourself with the knowledge to better protect your rights, give voice to the voiceless, and challenge social norms." D'Orio.
We've challenged ourselves as a department to follow the curriculum Project READY: Reimagining Equity & Access for Diverse Youth. The purpose of the free online professional development curriculum is; improving knowledge about race and racism, racial equity, and culturally sustaining pedagogy. The primary focus of the Project READY curriculum is on improving relationships with, services to, and resources for youth of color and Native youth. And that's our goal too along with recognizing and calling out systemic racism wherever it exists. I know that some will feel this is not enough. But it is a place to start to edify ourselves in a mostly white school community about race. It is a place to start the challenging discussions that must follow in the coming school year and beyond and help students own their awakening to systemic racism and white privilege as told through the lived experiences of Black Americans. A comprehensive and inclusive reading list has been developed for Upper School Summer Reading. It was developed by Kate Covintree, the Upper School Librarian, and Ann Bruno, Upper School English Teacher and is rich with BIPOC authors, a vital resource that is long overdue. Each division is working to create similar developmentally appropriate reading recommendations.
In our newest blog posts Words on Wednesdays, read, watch, listen, act, each of the librarians identifies a time and place, a book, a video, and a podcast that changed their thinking about race and white privilege. By sharing these multimedia experiences and inviting guest bloggers to share theirs we are hoping in some small but important way to keep the momentum going in this watershed moment. What we cannot do is speak to the moment and then fade away again behind the book club, booklist, and collection development work that at times protects us from having the difficult conversations and identifying racism in our community and beyond. We want our shelves both physical and digital to be emptied of these books and we want to be better as members of our communities to speak these truths and get these books into the hands of those who need them most. We've spent our professional lives getting the right book to the right reader. We're doubling down now because those "right readers" at this moment are those of us who need to develop cultural competencies and to collect and evangelize narratives by diverse authors as we learn about ourselves and we recognize and challenge systemic racism wherever it exists.
Infographics created by Kate Covintree, Upper School Librarian using Canva and Genially