"School librarian cultivates a love of reading"

Reposted here with the permission of The Davis Enterprise - http://www.davisenterprise.com/local-news/schools-news/school-librarian-cultivates-a-love-of-reading/

Teacher-librarian Amanda Sharpe chats with members of READ, Readers of Emerson And Da Vinci, at a club meeting last week. The club, modeled after a successful one Sharpe started at Harper Junior High, has about a dozen members. Fred Gladdis/Enterprise photo

 It was, perhaps, an inkling of what Amanda Sharpe would become when back in her elementary school days at Valley Oak she decided to read the entire 398.2 Dewey decimal section of the library in order.

Completely up to speed on all things fairy tale and folklore, she would follow that up a few years later at Holmes Junior High by reading another entire section, and also serve as a teaching assistant in the library there, a position she still recalls fondly.

"I've always loved libraries," Sharpe says. "I love the smell of books, I love everything about them. I read all the time."

And though she would go on to become a classroom teacher, including for several years at César Chávez Elementary School in Davis, one of her favorite things, she said, "was collecting books for my students … Sharing them was so compelling to me."

So perhaps it was no surprise in 2008 -- when the Davis school district experienced the first cuts in what was to become an ongoing funding crisis -- that Sharpe decided to take that passion for books a step further.

"I was one of the teachers who got a pink slip," she recalled, "and I thought it was a good time to go back to school."

She did just that, entering a two-year library and information science program at UCLA.

Her master's thesis there centered on a website she created to help librarians who don't speak Spanish, but who serve primarily Latino populations.

The website, Children & Libraries en Español, www.chil-es.org, remains a well-used site -- and for good reason.

"Most librarians are still white women," Sharpe noted, "but the population we serve is not."

The website provides tips on everything from starting bilingual story times to improving community outreach and bilingual collections.

Sharpe returned to Davis in 2010, armed with her master's degree in library science, and her timing would prove fortuitous. Longtime school district librarian Jamie Boston was just retiring, and as a known commodity in the district, Sharpe was seen as just the person to fill the open position.

Today, she is the librarian for both Emerson and Harper junior high schools, and her passion for books and reading is evident at both schools. The library club she started at Harper last year now has 35 regular members and the club she started at Emerson this year has about a dozen.

"It's for kids who love the library and love books… and don't necessarily have another niche," she said.

Club members meet weekly to help her select new books for the collection, pick a "book of the month" and help with fundraising, the biggest of which remains book fairs, as is the case at all of the Davis school libraries.

Like her fellow librarians in the school district, Sharpe also organizes and runs the annual Battle of the Books, where teams of students read a collection of books over the course of a month or so and then compete against each other in a trivia-like contest of book knowledge.

School libraries are, of course, about more than just books these days -- they are about information technology, and teaching students how to find the information they need. Sharpe says receiving her master's when she did has been very helpful in that regard.

She has since redesigned the websites for both Harper and Emerson, as well as the school library pages on both sites, making them more user-friendly.

"My goal is to make the sites a better way to communicate with parents," she said. "It's still a work in progress."

And if she wasn't busy enough, Sharpe is also in the midst of a two-year term serving on a prestigious national committee that recently chose the winner of the Pura Belpré Award, given annually at the winter American Library Association meeting to a Latino or Latina writer and illustrator whose work best portrays and celebrates the Latino cultural experience.

Sharpe was selected for the committee because of her work on the website she created. It was, she said, a huge honor.

"Everyone wants to be on the committee," she explained. "I was kind of flabbergasted when they told me I was chosen."

Getting to be a part of the selection process, to notify the winners and be present at the news conference announcing the selections last month was a thrill, she said.

"Giving this award every year is part of the way that we as librarians help to promote cultural diversity and representation of the children we work with in the books that they read," she said.

"There is a huge population of Latino children," she noted, "but a tiny percentage of books aimed at them."

Sharpe speaks passionately about the importance of finding the right books for all of her charges. While her own literary genres of choice run to fantasy and science fiction, she reads everything -- mysteries, historical fiction, whatever -- in order to be able to recommend the perfect book for every student.

"When you get a reluctant reader, you need to find just the right book," she noted.

Sharpe uses what funds are available to expand the collections at both Harper and Emerson and has been known to go out and buy a book with her own money if it's something she knows a student really, really wants.

"My husband hates when I do that," she laughs.

No laughing matter to Sharpe and her fellow librarians is the district's current budget crisis. If Measure C, which would renew a pair of existing parcel taxes, fails, "the library, as we know it, will cease to exist," Sharpe said.

The parcel taxes currently fund 5.25 full-time-equivalent teacher-librarian positions like Sharpe's. All of these staffers, with the exception of Davis High's librarian, serve two or more schools in the district.

"All of our jobs would disappear," Sharpe explained. "The hours for the libraries would be reduced and all teaching in the library, teaching kids how to use 21st-century skills, would go away."

The standards that students are expected to learn would remain, she added, "but the curriculum for learning library skills just wouldn't get taught. And a lot of specialized knowledge would be lost."

Lost, too, would be a lot of historical knowledge. Nearly all of Sharpe's fellow librarians have not only served in the district for many years, they've also served in various positions at the state library association level and have garnered all kinds of awards and recognition for their work in Davis.

Though all are both librarians and classroom teachers -- so their seniority likely would enable them to land a classroom teaching position should the parcel tax fail -- it's the idea of eliminating teacher-librarians from the school landscape that troubles them even more than their own personal situations.

So Sharpe and her colleagues will be out in force in the coming weeks, helping run the Measure C booth at the Davis Farmers Market, where they will be happy to explain the importance of school libraries and the teacher -ibrarians who run them.

That is, when they're not running the Battles of the Books, picture book celebrations or the many other events taking place this month in school libraries around town.

On the calendar:

• Willett Elementary School celebrates the eighth annual Family Reading Program through Feb. 23, culminating in "An Evening of Reading by the 100s," a celebration of books read. Last year's total: 3,463 books.
• Birch Lane Elementary School celebrates its second annual "Love a Picture Book Month," the same event that landed the school in the New York Times last year. The event culminates in "Family Love a Picture Book Night" on March 1.
• Korematsu and North Davis elementary schools will hold their Battles of the Books this month.
• Every Saturday until March 3, librarians will be available at the Measure C table at the Farmers Market in Central Park, Fourth and C streets, to answer questions about what they do.