Ep. 104 Perfect Summer Partners

Sunshine and Stories Episode 104: Perfect Summer Partners 

Episode Summary: 
Special guest, Suzi Tonini, Colorado’s School Library Leadership Consultant, joins Kate Compton to chat about the school library landscape in our state and how public library professionals can partner with school library professionals for summer and beyond. If you’d like to connect with Suzi to learn more about any of the information she shares in this episode, you can reach her at tonini_s@cde.state.co.us. 

00:00 – Introduction
01:26 – What should we know about school libraries?
05:35 – Examples of school/public library partnership
16:30 – Navigating challenges
20:44 – Book and program highlights
23:32 – Closing 

References:
Collaborative Summer Library Program
LibSlide.org Colorado State Profile
HESTL EdCon
Living Color by Steve Jenkins
Color the Sky by David Elliot (author) Evan Turk (illustrator)
Colorado Virtual Library Mailing Lists 101
Join Libnet (All things libraries in Colorado) here
Join cys-lib (our Colorado Youth Services Network mailing list) here 

Next Drop-in Chat:
Hey Colorado library folks! Join us on September 24, 2024 at 11:00 am to noon Mountain Time for our first online Summer Drop-in Chat. No need to register. Come when you can, stay for as long as you can. See you soon! 

If you work in a library and gave us a listen, please let us know what you think by completing a short feedback survey for this episode. 

Podcast theme music by Transistor.fm. Learn how to start a podcast here. 

This project is made possible in part by a grant from the US Institute of Museum and Library Service. 

Transcript

Sunshine and Stories podcast transcript for Episode 104

[00:00] [music] 

Kate Compton: You're listening to Sunshine and Stories, a Kate-cast from the Colorado State Library's summer design studio with your hosts,  

Kate Brunner: Kate Brunner 

Kate Compton: And Kate Compton. 

Kate Brunner: Tune in every other week as we explore one summer reading topic. From colorful program ideas to community wide engagement to avoiding burnout, we have got you covered. 

Kate Compton: If you have other questions or want to dive into any topic further, check out Libraries Learn.org for our next live summer drop in chat date happening Tuesdays starting this fall. 

[00:46] Kate Compton: In the summer of 1820, Samuel Seymour and Titan Ramsey Peel arrived in present day Colorado with the expedition of Major Stephen H Long. The namesake of Long's Peak near Estes Park. This was the first American expedition to include artists. Their views of the Rocky Mountains and present day Roxborough State Park near Denver can be seen in collections from Boston to California. This was quite a collaboration. And hopefully this fun Colorado art fact inspires you to think a little more about our topic today.

[01:25] Kate Compton: Today on our show we have Suzie Tonini. She is the School Library Leadership Consultant from the Colorado State Library. Suzie has years of experience as a librarian and educator from early childhood education to grade 12. Thanks so much for being on the show with us today, Suzie, and sharing all your expertise.

Suzi Tonini: You're very welcome. Happy to be here.

Kate Compton: So Suzie, many of our listeners are in public libraries. Can you give them a little bit of context about what you're seeing in school libraries across the state?

Suzi Tonini: Absolutely. So in Colorado, gosh, we have so many incredibly talented and passionate school librarians. And I think it's safe to say that one thing that they all have in common is that they're very busy. In addition to managing the library space, the collection, programming, many school librarians also collaborate with classroom teachers. They lead instruction in information literacy, media literacy, digital citizenship. They lead professional learning for their staff and usually they're juggling ten other roles in their school community. And because Colorado is a local control state, meaning individual districts determine whether they will require library services or staffing, the role can look vastly different between districts and even between schools within a district.

So I would say, you know, if you're not already familiar with your local school district, a good first step is just understanding what library services and staffing exists there. Because they may not have a certified school librarian in their district. Or they may have 50 certified school librarians in their district, and so on. One resource is LibSlide.org. It's a profile not only of the state of staffing trends and what those staffing ratios look like in the library, but you can also search by district. You can actually search by district and figure out how many certified librarians are in that district, what the student to librarian ratio is and lots of other really valuable information.

Kate Compton: That's a great resource. I love that. Thank you so much. I never heard of that. So that's something I'll use too. And is the best way, once you've kind of figured out how many different people there are, if there is someone, what's the best way to reach out to a school librarian?

Suzi Tonini: So I surveyed several school districts to ask this question, and the overwhelming majority responded that e-mail was the best communication strategy. One school district library coordinator provides their public library contact with a list of their librarians and their e-mail addresses, which is I'm sure, incredibly helpful for both organizations. I would also add that connecting with the district-level library coordinator would be a great strategy. Most of the larger districts will have someone in that role. In a smaller district they likely would not have a district coordinator, but if they do, that person is just really key in creating those types of relationships. And that communication stream.

Kate Compton: I love it. And I know you said school librarians are wearing a lot of different hats. They've got a lot of different things happening. When would you suggest sending these emails?

Suzi Tonini: [laughs] Uh, yesterday? You know, this obviously varies depending on the school district. So that's just a really great question to ask of that librarian that you're partnering with or that district library coordinator. Most districts responded that reaching out in August before the start of the school year is ideal timing. That's when a lot of that year long planning is happening. There's another large district that responded that most librarians can pivot if the offered program is the right fit. But in general, one thing to keep in mind is that most teachers are planning two to four weeks in advance. So sooner is always better.

Kate Compton: Yeah, and I think a lot of librarians are diving into their summer reading in August. So a great time to just reach out and get connected.

Suzi Tonini: Yeah, absolutely.

[05:35] Kate Compton: Are there examples of great partnerships that you've seen across the state?

Suzi Tonini: Oh, this is my favorite question. We have so many great examples of strong partnerships in Colorado. Um, I'm not going to do it justice, but I just want to shout out several of them. 

So many districts and their local public library systems have partnered to provide student access to their digital resources using the student credentials, and that, you know, if you are a teacher or school librarian to not have another way to log in to have that easy access? That really makes the difference often whether they're using that resource at the public library or not at all. Teaching students research skills and how to use online databases, I mean, it's really critical for preparing them for post-secondary work. But many schools can't afford online database subscriptions. So that type of partnership meets a huge need for schools and can really have that benefit of establishing that relationship for public libraries.

Boulder Valley School District, they have a district level partnership with Boulder, Broomfield, Lafayette and Louisville called Student One and Boulder and Broomfield also allow print book checkout with those student credentials. Another example is Academy District 20. They have a similar program called Power Pass with Pikes Peak, And Jefferson County Public Library issues every school one institutional card and a class set of 30 computer use only cards and what that means for the school is that teachers can check out all the materials they need without having to use their own library cards. And those computer use only cards? That really facilitates that student access to the online databases. 

At our recent HESTL Edcon conference back in June the Summit School district team had the school district and the Summit County Library. They presented a session about their process to create that kind of partnership. They call it One Card if anyone is interested in that slide deck. You know, they really did an amazing job of walking through all the different steps it took to create that type of partnership.

Gosh, I'm going to keep going on and on because there's so many!

Kate Compton: Yeah, keep it coming!

Suzi Tonini: So, another fantastic way to partner is around author visits and obviously summer programming. So BVSD and Lafayette Public Library, they this past year partnered around bringing author, Matt de la Peña, to Boulder Valley and Lafayette Public Library. So Centaurus High School teacher librarian, Shoshanna Turgel, and language arts teacher, Cassie Ktsanes, they planned the author visit. And they partnered with Lafayette Public Library to create this program where they used grant funding to pay for de la Peña’s speaker fees and then the Friends of the Lafayette Public Library donated copies of his books in English and Spanish to students.

And I still can't believe Matt agreed to this. He actually visited in one day, three Boulder Valley elementary schools, one middle school, Centaurus High School, and that evening he spoke at Lafayette Public Library. So it was really, truly a win-win for everybody.

Kate Compton: That sounds amazing! I'm so glad you got him.

Suzi Tonini: I actually invited myself to the Centaurus presentation and by that time he was, you know, asking for water, [laughs] and I'm not sure he would agree to do that again. [laughs] But he was truly fantastic to offer all of those ways for the public to access that talk. 

You know, gosh, a gold standard is the Jefferson County Public School District and then Jefferson County Public Library. They have just built a strong symbiotic partnership over time and two examples of their partnership and just kind of how it's grown into phenomenal ways to partner and leverage one another is their summer reading initiatives collaboration and their recent One Book, One Author program.

So just some quick background on the two organizations. They've created this solid stream of communication. JCPL staff meet monthly with Jill Weaver, the Jeffco Library Services Specialist, and Tara Degelmann, the Jeffco Library Services Coordinator. 

They do a ton of cross promotion of each other's work. For example, Jeffco has a summer literacy program called Jeffco Reads. And they reached out to JCPL to ask what their theme of the summer reading program was going to be and found out it was going to be adventure. And they built their school program around that adventure theme. And what ended up resulting is three programs. So the JCPL summer challenge program, they called it Where Adventure Begins, the Jeffco program, and they also have a program called 500 Books before Middle School. Basically, they created one way for students to register and participate in all three programs at once, which meant that kids were like triple dipping into all of the prizes, which was intentional. 

I loved the fact that JCPL bought summer challenge t-shirts for every single digital teacher librarian in Jeffco. They distributed them in April and they gave them to English teachers who also wanted. In May, JCPL librarians came out to gosh, probably over 50% of their schools to promote their summer programming. But they're promoting all of the programs at once, and it was just a really beautiful example of that.

Kate Compton: Maybe we'll have to talk about that during our marketing episode as well.

Suzi Tonini: Yeah, I mean, the t-shirts are just brilliant. And gosh, yeah, I had the chance to chat with Terri Faulkner. She's the core services supervisor for kids and family programming.

She was one of the wizards behind the curtain of the Jacqueline Woodson visit. So when she was chatting with Heidi Floyd, who was the former library services coordinator for Jefferson County, you know one of her dreams was to do a One book, One district. Heidi retired and now we have Jill and Tara and what they ended up coming up with was a One Author, One District program.

And this partnership is -- I really won't even be able to scratch the surface of how many ways they collaborated and really leveraged the strengths of both teams. But just to name a few, basically what they did is they coordinated to bring in Jacqueline Woodson to do an author visit during the daytime at Jefferson Junior-Senior High School in a 500 person auditorium.

Students were brought in in person for the visit, but then they also live streamed it all over the district, and they reached just under 10,000 students that day. They coordinated to provide books to classrooms. They leverage their relationships with their foundations. They were able to purchase books for students. They brought in student leadership teams to be student ambassadors. The school district did an amazing job of really providing all of the organizational steps to make it successful. Jill and Tara send out a weekly newsletter each week. There was a new action step for how to prepare for the author visits. Gosh, I just you know, Terri Faulkner is the person to reach out to if you want to learn all the nuts and bolts of the magic of how this happened. But the result was that the entire community, between the daytime event for students, the evening event for that was open to the public, the entire community had this multi-generational experience with Jacqueline Woodson. Her books were promoted across the district in so many different ways. And to me, it's just like a perfect example of how you can really build off the strengths of two different organizations to really benefit your entire community.

Kate Compton: I love it. Suzie, you're giving us so many different lessons and thinking about communication and keeping things consistent, thinking about the whole community. Are there any other lessons or challenges that you see in these partnerships?

Suzi Tonini: You know, I think you know, partnerships always bring challenges. One other thing I wanted to mention though, I attended a session at ALA last year which was called “Meet Me at the Library” and it was called “a bridge to parent engagement and school partnerships.” And basically it was the public library hosting an event for students and their families. And that was the key. It was, you know, also for their parents to come. And the main goal of the event was just to create a positive experience at the library, sign up students for library cards, and to me what the key piece was to elevate the school librarian. And so basically, they invited families. They came in the evening. They really promoted it to school staff. School staff were there in the library, the principal, the teachers, and absolutely the school librarian. The public library provided a brief introduction. There were craft activities on hand and the person who gave the tour of the public library was the school librarian, which I thought was just so beautiful. And just another way to really elevate the importance of you know, public libraries can't be in every school, and likewise public libraries have so many strengths that really complement what we do in the school as a school librarian. And so I just really loved how they structured that to create this family event in the public library, but then also elevate the school librarian at the same time. 

And they've since expanded on it. Now they have Meet Me at the Library for STEAM. And so now they have STEAM stations set up where families come with their students. They have a passport; they go around and participate in different steam activities. The teachers are the ones leading the STEAM activities. The school provides a ton of volunteers for the event and it's just truly a win-win for everybody involved.

[16:30] Kate Compton: And how about challenges?

Suzi Tonini: Yeah. So it's so fun to talk about the fun stuff. I think busy schedules top the list. I recommend getting creative and you know how can you take something off the plate of the school librarian to help build that relationship? One thing we did when I worked at the district level at Denver Public Schools, my small team of district librarians would sometimes offer to be “library fairies”, and we would share a menu of kind of one-day services that we could provide. Like we can come support with inventory, or shelving, or weeding. Or we can teach online database instruction or how to access Sora ebooks and audiobooks to classes. And this was always well received because it just was a value added that one person couldn't do on their own. But we were also really trying to be invisible helpers as well, and so that might be something that may be a way to help kind of start a relationship.

I think that the turnover rate in both organizations can also present challenges. You know, for example, a new teacher might reach out to their local public library and not be aware of the support that they already have within their own school or district. And so one secret to success of the Jefferson County partnership is it's their protocol of always directing traffic to the professional in the building. And the way they do that is whenever they receive a request from a school or a teacher, they always include the digital teacher librarian in their response. And I think that's just a way of recognizing that it's a partnership.

Kate Compton: I love that that's such a great, easy kind of practice to put in place and then kind of continues that communication. I love the idea of even just, you know, like you're saying being a fairy, being in the space. You never know what you'll hear or what ideas might come from just that face to face relationship building.

Suzi Tonini: Yeah, and providing a menu of choices, you know, because we could say like we're going to come in and help you weed, but that's not helpful if that's not number one on their list. And so giving them a menu, it just creates that co-creation.

Kate Compton: OK, Suzie, we're getting to the end of our time here. But I just wanted to ask, are there any other thoughts or ideas that you wanted to share with our listeners?

Suzi Tonini: I would say coming from the school side of the house, I think it's just really important to remember nothing about us without us, you know. Build relationships, learn what the strengths are of both organizations and not only the system strengths and resources strengths, but also the talent strengths of the people that you're collaborating with. And then co-create programming based on common needs and goals.

You know, as I mentioned at the outset, it's important to recognize that because there are no state level requirements for districts to provide students with a school library program, school library resources or certified school librarian, school librarians in Colorado are vulnerable to budget cuts when there are local or state funding shortfalls. And this can understandably make some school librarians worry that partnering with their public library may lead to their school leader deciding that the public library can provide all they need in terms of library instruction and library access for their students.

But you know, as we see with partnerships like what's happening in Jefferson County, a strong library ecosystem exponentially benefits the school community and the wider local community. And they're just a great model of trained librarians in schools, strong library leadership at the district level, and collaborative public library leaders like Terri Faulkner, who plan programming that leverages the strengths of both organizations. That piece is, you know, just so key. It's just always keep in mind that every single school or district is going to be unique, and building that relationship first and basing your collaboration on common needs and goals.

Kate Compton: I love it, Suzie. Thanks again for being here.

Suzi Tonini: Absolutely. Thank you so much for the opportunity.

[20:44] Kate Brunner: In honor of all the hard work our partners in schools do, how about a little colorful science learning via picture book this week? 

Our first book recommendation is Living Color by Steve Jenkins. This book is about animals all around the world, from the familiar to the wonderfully strange. These vivid illustrations in this nonfiction book explore how animals use color to survive, find a mate, signal danger, and for many other ingenious everyday activities.

The second book you might want to look at for next summer combines a little nature learning with a little art learning. This book is titled Color the Sky by David Elliott. Evan Turk is the illustrator. In the pages of this book you'll find beautiful imagery of birds in the sky to explain primary and secondary colors and even basic color mixing.

For a program highlight this episode, I wanted to give a colorful shout out to all of the Colorado libraries across the state who are hosting local art shows right now. There were too many in my social media feed to pick just one. Many of these art shows are partnerships with local artists or artists-in-residence, but several of them are youth art shows that are happening because of successful partnerships between folks at the library and folks at their local schools.

If your library jurisdiction hasn't hosted an art show at the library yet, but you'd be interested in learning more, maybe reach out to your neighboring libraries to ask them about their experiences. If you work at a Colorado library, you could also come to the next drop in chat or post an e-mail question about hosting art shows at the library to one of the relevant Colorado library mailing lists like Libnet or cys-lib. We'll link how to sign up for those lists in this episode’s show notes.

[22:30] Kate Brunner: That's our Kate cast for today, y’all but we hope you'll join the upcoming community drop in discussion.

Kate Compton: We're hosting these discussions all year long. All Colorado library professionals involved in summer programming are welcome. No need to register, stay for the full hour or just pop in to say hi to colleagues across the state. Details for the next drop in session could be found in the show notes for this episode and on Libraries Learn.org the Colorado State Library’s continuing education calendar and archive.

Kate Brunner: We'd like to say thank you to all the Colorado library professionals who shared book recommendations, program successes and other artful ideas with us as we were designing this year's podcast. This project is also made possible by a grant from the US Institute for Museum and Library Services.

Kate Compton: Thanks for joining us and we'll catch you next time.

[23:22] [music]