Connecting Kids to Books (the work of school librarians) - November 2014 East Side Monthly

For November's East Side Monthly, I wrote "Connecting Kids to Books: A Closer Look at Our School Librarians," based on a lovely conversation I had with recently retired middle school librarian Sarah Morenon, who happens to look a bit like the lovely librarian in the illustration! Enjoy.

Lovely illustration by Kendrah Smith.

Connecting Kids to Books: A Closer Look at Our School Librarians

I suspect that most of us take school libraries for granted. It’s a given that a school has a library, right? Along with the gym, cafeteria and classrooms there is, of course, a library full of books. This is utterly unremarkable. But of course, the existence and quality of a school library is not at all a given, as I learned in a recent conversation with East Sider Sarah Morenon. She retired in June from her career as a school librarian in the Providence Public Schools, most recently at Nathanael Greene Middle School, where she was part of the faculty for 15 years.

Morenon became a school librarian mid-career, deciding to leave a 20-year career at the Social Security Administration to earn a Masters degree in library science at the University of Rhode Island and follow her passion for books and learning. Morenon’s love for middle school kids and passion for the books that light up their minds is wildly infectious, making it abundantly clear that she chose her second career wisely.

Morenon shared with me what it took for her to build an impressive collection of 15,000 books at Greene, which currently educates 1,000 sixth through eighth graders. In recent years, there has been no predictable budget allocation to buy new books. This is true throughout the Providence Public Schools. Morenon brought books into Greene’s library through donations and fundraising efforts. She made a serious effort to be familiar with every book on the shelves so she could perform what is, in her own view, the essential function of a school librarian’s job: “To match the right book with each kid so they could stay in love with reading.” This means, of course, that good school librarians know not only the books but also the young people who enter their domains. School librarians do more than facilitate the literary lives of students, but that’s the core of their profession, in Morenon’s view. She points out that due to the demands made on classroom teachers, the librarian is often the only person in a school, and sometimes in a child’s life, to inspire and facilitate reading simply for pleasure – an essential part of education and modern human experience.

She worries that in some schools, the lack of full-time school librarians makes it far less likely that kids will connect with books that they love. Several elementary schools in the district, including Vartan Gregorian Elementary School, don’t have full-time librarians. When the librarian isn’t present, the school library is often shut. This also happens when school librarians are pulled away for other responsibilities such as lunch supervision. This is a common practice that reduces the already sparse time during the school day when librarians can connect with students and collaborate with classroom teachers to support their teaching and connect with students to inspire their reading. As Morenon says, “I worry that the district may not be using us wisely.”

In Morenon’s view, when school librarians are seen as “utility players” on a school staff, rather than key personnel with a specific role, Providence may be less likely to attract top candidates for open school library positions. The diminishment of the school librarian’s role also has real consequences for educational equity. According to research gathered by the American Association of School Librarians, the lack of well-trained, dedicated school librarians and high-quality school libraries can significantly reduce student achievement, a loss felt most acutely in urban schools.

Morenon suggested ways that you can help ensure sure that the school libraries in our neighborhood remain vibrant places for learning. Book donations are always welcome, though please remember that, as Morenon says, “It’s the librarian’s decision.” School librarians know what they need and cannot necessarily serve as a dumping ground for all titles. If time permits, you can connect with Inspiring Minds, the nonprofit that organizes school volunteers in Providence, and work with a school librarian directly. If nothing else, you should view school libraries with new appreciation and understanding that every book on the shelves and in a student’s hands is there because of a school librarian’s efforts and dedication.

PPSD Middle School Registration and Open Middle Schools

It's almost middle school registration time! Later this month, Providence middle schools will be open for prospective sixth grade students and their families as follows:

Monday, January 23, 6:00-8:00pm
Gilbert Stuart Middle School, 188 Princeton Avenue

Roger Williams Middle School, 278 Thurbers Avenue

Nathan Bishop Middle School, 101 Sessions Street 

Wednesday, January 25 

Esek Hopkins Middle School, 480 Charles Street

DelSesto Middle School, 152 Springfield Street

Nathanael Greene Middle School, 721 Chalkstone Avenue

This year, Providence Public Schools has created a useful checklist that clearly outlines the registration process. It's here, and additional info about registration can be found here at the main registration page. Student assignment is explained here; generally speaking, Providence uses a neighborhood school policy with some choice built in. Eighty percent of a school's population is drawn from its neighborhood, and twenty percent can choose to attend from outside the neighborhood. Middle school "neighborhoods" are defined as a mile and a half radius from the school. You can ask PPSD registration which is/are your neighborhood school(s).

Fifth graders at schools in Providence--public schools and private schools--will receive registration forms on January 17, according to the info I learned when I called PPSD registration (401-456-9297) and are due back to the school by February 3. I encourage you to verify this information through your child's school and/or your own call to the registration office. If you're coming in from outside Providence, you need to go to the PPSD registration center to obtain and return the middle school registration form. See the checklist for more details about that.

Our family went through this a year ago, I wrote about the process in January 2011 when we visited visited middle schools with our fifth grader and again in June 2011 when we finally found out to which middle school our kid has been assigned. Barring any disruptive events such as last year's school closures, I believe that families will find out much earlier this year about school assignment, though I don't know when. If anyone does know, please share!

PPSD middle school placement letter has arrived

On Saturday, we received notification from PPSD that Elias had a spot at Nathan Bishop Middle School. He'll start there in the fall with many friends from MLK Elementary School and elsewhere--preschool, soccer, baseball, religious school, camp, the playground. Bishop is our neighborhood school, both in terms of PPSD's definition (neighborhood = kid lives within a mile and a half of the school) and in the very real everyday sense, because we live across the street (no, we don't live in the Brown Stadium).

I've written a bit about our process of identifying which middle school option would suit him best, and I think that he and his friends will have a great experience at Bishop. Mostly, I am relieved to have certain word that he'll be there in the fall.

Patiently waiting is not in my natural skill set, so I didn't enjoy this extended process of waiting to hear about middle school placement. For sure, I am not the only person who felt that way. And for sure, not everyone is as satisfied with the outcome. One of Elias' classmates who lives on the other side of the city desperately wanted a seat at Bishop. She well below spot #50 on the wait list, and she is crushed not to be heading onto middle school with her friends. I don't know how far beyond her spot Bishop's wait list extends, but I suspect there are many more.

I hope that the families who wanted to attend or remain at soon the be closed Bridgham Middle School are happy with their children's assignments. And of course I hope that all families across the city will send their newly minted middle schoolers to schools that will help their kids be their best selves as they get ready for high school and the next steps in their lives.

It will take a whole lot more than hope, of course. For those families who did not get a seat at the middle school of your choice, I hope you get involved with your kid's school and direct your passion and energy toward making it the high quality school it needs to be for your kid and all kids.

I will be right there with you; I'll be representing Bishop next year on the district's Parent Advisory Committee (PAC), which meets monthly for collaborative school improvement work and problem-solving, and I am eager to connect with representatives from the other middle schools across the city. If your kid attends or will attend Greene, DelSesto, Roger Williams, Gilbert Stuart, or Esek Hopkins, please join us at the PAC so we can work together with school staff to create the best places for our kids to learn and grow. I'll be posting next year's PAC dates here, and if you have any questions or want to talk, post a comment here or email me at jill.davidson (at) gmail (dot) com.

PPSD middle school curriculum correction

I recently posted a version of my most recent East Side Monthly education column on Nathan Bishop Middle School. The blog post that reproduces the article is here. Since then, I heard from Theresa Fox, a seventh grade English teacher at Bishop, who wanted to share her thoughts and clarify a point that I made about middle school curriculum in the Providence Public Schools. I had stated

Clearly, it’s too soon to use long-term indicators such as high school graduation rates to determine whether the district’s newly implemented curriculum—which is the same at all of Providence public middle schools except for Nathanael Greene Middle School’s Advanced Academics program—will produce the results needed to close existing achievement gaps and propel all students to success in high school and beyond.

Ms. Fox corrected my statement that Nathanael Greene does not have a different curriculum than the other Providence public middle schools, and I am grateful for her clarification. Her entire response, which I believe will be printed in East Side Monthly's March edition, appears below. A few more thoughts from me follow her letter.

To the Editor:

I enjoyed reading Jill Davidson's recent piece about Nathan Bishop Middle School ("An Enviable Choice: A Look Inside Nathan Bishop," February, 2011) and her decision to possibly have her son attend next year.

I am thrilled to be teaching at Bishop and to be a part of such a vibrant and positive educational community.  Wonderfully supportive administrators, creative and energetic faculty and staff, supportive and engaged parents, and a diverse student body make for a truly exciting environment in which to teach and learn and it seems to get better each week.  At Bishop, I can help a student craft a piece of fiction that makes me wish I'd written it myself, watch excitedly as another masters his first "perfect paragraph," enjoy cafeteria table conversation in a mix of French, Haitian Creole, Arabic, and English with newcomers from Haiti, Guinea, Ivory Coast, and Iraq, have a conversation a with student who reads The Economist for fun, and guide students through research about events they'd recently discovered in the history of their home country, the Dominican Republic.  In short, I agree with Ms. Davidson that it is an exciting addition to the list of school choices.

Before coming to Bishop, I taught at Nathanael Greene Middle School for 18 terrific years, half of those years in the Advanced Academic Program, and I served on the district's curriculum writing committee for a year, so I feel somewhat qualified to question one bit of her piece, however.

She mentions that the district's "newly implemented curriculum...is the same at all Providence public middle schools, except for Nathanael Greene's Advanced Academics program."  I did not know that this misperception was out there in the community, as, in fact, there is no special curriculum for the AA program--nor has there ever been one.  The curriculum is actually the same for all middle schools in all subjects--except for advanced math courses, into which students are scheduled according to placement test scores.  It is, and has always been, up to individual teachers or teams of teachers in the AA program (as in any classroom) to differentiate curriculum according to student needs, interests, and abilities.

Ms. Davidson's implication that a "policy-driven district program" exists with an AA curriculum at Greene is simply false and creates a false set of criteria for choice between schools.  I think parents should know this as they make decisions about their children's education.

Theresa Fox
Grade 7 English teacher
Nathan Bishop Middle School

Again, I am really grateful to Ms. Fox for her perspective and for correcting my misunderstanding. As I told her in email, I do think that that it's fair to say that Greene's Advanced Academics offering is a "policy-driven district program." It is offered to students as such. I need to understand more about the actual PPSD policy/policies that create the opportunity for academically advanced programs; I guess it's possible that such offerings exist in practice with no policy underpinnings. But Greene's program does exist and is promoted to students as a distinct experience, which I now know is the result of educator initiative within the standard curriculum framework.

Thank you, Ms. Fox! And thanks to everyone for the feedback I've received on the East Side Monthly columns. It's so valuable and much appreciated.

Choosing Middle Schools: A Visit to Nathan Bishop - February's East Side Monthly Column

East Side Monthly's February 2011 issue is out in print and online; for this issue, I wrote about visiting Nathan Bishop Middle School, our neighborhood middle school, in preparation for my son Elias' move to sixth grade. I wanted to know more about the ways the school supported students as they grew as learners and as well-rounded people, and had a great conversation with Amy Battisti, one of Bishop's guidance counselors. I hope I did her work justice. I also touch on the decision we're making between Bishop and Nathanel Greene Middle School's advanced academic program, about which there's more to say for sure.

Here's the column as I wrote it--the version in East Side Monthly is slightly edited. You can find it online at http://www.providenceonline.com/eastsidemonthly/read.html on page 39.

Choosing Middle Schools: A Visit to Nathan Bishop

My oldest son will be entering middle school next year. While still puzzling over our alarmingly swift arrival at this stage (Weren’t you just in kindergarten, kid?) we organized ourselves to look at middle schools. Since kindergarten, he has been generally content and successful at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary School on Camp Street. Given his track record, our values, and other factors (three kids, this economy, any expectation of affording college) we’re staying on the public school path.

Along with most or all other East Side addresses, we fall well within Nathan Bishop Middle School’s zone. Next year’s class of 208 sixth graders will complete Nathan Bishop’s student body, which has grown one grade per year since the school reopened in 2008. Most readers will remember that Bishop was deeply troubled. Poorly attended by East Siders of all economic strata, neighborhoods, and races, it was not serving most its students effectively. After the Providence Public Schools shuttered Bishop in 2006, the East Side Public Education Coalition led a public demand for its reopening. As a result of advocacy, historical preservation requirements, pre-recession economics, high-quality educational architects, and constructive collaboration with Providence Public Schools leadership, a thoroughly and thoughtfully renovated Nathan Bishop Middle School emerged with new leadership, staff members, and intentions.

As my son and I observed when we spent an evening in the building at an exceptionally well-attended open house, Bishop’s renovation is state of the art, utilizing technology and design to create fruitful conditions for learning. Bishop’s brand-new spiffiness also created conditions for crankiness, at least for me, because it contrasts so jarringly with the timeworn settings of most other public schools in Providence—thereby demonstrating the predominant lack of access to suitable facilities for teaching and learning. But a column devoted to educational infrastructure investment is a task for another day. Back to Bishop.

After the open house and additional conversations with Bishop’s staff members and students, my son is fired up. Many of his MLK Elementary classmates chose Bishop, and he is looking forward to joining neighborhood buddies who have attended other elementary schools. His verve seems to be adding fuel to his occasionally flickering fire to excel academically.

Still, I have questions. How will he and his peers reinforce habits of cooperation, work on his social skills, and continue to respect and reach out beyond race, class, and other differences? How will the educators at Bishop encourage him to step on the gas academically, build lifelong learning skills and habits, and take risks? What support will he receive? What challenges will he be likely to experience so that he won’t coast or settle for “good enough?”

In order to dig more deeply, I met with Amy Battisti, one of Bishop’s two guidance counselors; when Bishop gains its third class in the fall, the school will have three counselors. An East Side resident hired in 2008, Battisti works with the current seventh graders and will move with them to eighth grade. By design, she knows each of her 210 students well. Four days a week, she eats lunch with students. She meets with every student in this low-stakes way three or four times annually. “Those lunches really pay off,” she says. “When something happens, they have that person they’ve already chatted with.” Battisti and her fellow guidance counselors also serve as a bridge between home and school in order to facilitate interaction among each student’s family members and six teachers.  Through 15-20 phone calls per day, numerous emails, and before-school meetings, Bishop’s guidance staff members spend a third of their time communicating with families.

Bishop’s student population is approximately one-third Hispanic, one-third African American, and one-third white and Asian; students come from the East Side and citywide. The school serves a large group of English Language Learners; many families speak Spanish at home. A range of students receives special education services. Over 60 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced lunch. Elements of the school’s culture, such as the highly visible code of conduct featured on signs in hallways and classrooms, indicate understanding of the opportunities and challenges of such multifaceted diversity, as well as the developmental needs of young adolescents to learn without fear, a fundamental precondition for success for all of us.

Battisti’s collaborates with teachers to assess student progress and provide intervention as needed, and she walked me through the academic support strategies that Providence’s middle school curriculum provides for struggling learners. Clearly, it’s too soon to use long-term indicators such as high school graduation rates to determine whether the district’s newly implemented curriculum—which is the same at all of Providence public middle schools except for Nathanael Greene Middle School’s Advanced Academics program—will produce the results needed to close existing achievement gaps and propel all students to success in high school and beyond.

We also discussed the ways Bishop’s educators provide challenges for students who exceed expectations and crave additional challenge. Some of Bishop’s teachers have opted to innovate within science, math, and English courses for those students who demonstrate aptitude and effort. This approach differs from Greene’s program in two ways: it’s implemented within the school as a result of educator initiative rather than as a policy-driven district program, and its “a la carte” approach provides opportunities for student-specific differentiation.

I took careful note of these differences, as we will be deciding between Bishop and Greene’s Advanced Academic program, should my son be accepted. We visited Greene as well; my son was able to visualize success there, though he feels strongly that he would prefer to stay in the neighborhood—or, as he puts it, sleep until 7:00am rather than get on the bus then. I’ll let you know where he ends up. Either way, I am grateful that through the efforts of Battisti and her colleagues, Bishop has become a place for teaching and learning for young people within and beyond the East Side.

Update: Please see this post for a correction from Bishop teacher Theresa Fox that points out that my assertion that Greene has a different curriculum from the other Providence middle schools is not accurate.