| Reminders of progress
Rebecca T. Miller, Editor-in-Chief
In contrast to reported librarian cuts in Illinois and California, stories of empowerment serve as reminders of hope. In Akron Public Schools, for example, thanks to a $100,000 donation from NBA star LeBron James’ foundation, the district now hosts one of the largest e-libraries in the country where students can access 3,400 new titles. Virginia middle school librarian Lauren McBride shares her story with SLJ of how her book club read Linda Sue Park’s A Long Walk to Water (Houghton Mifflin, 2010)—a book about the civil war in South Sudan and its thousands of orphans and child refugees—and how the story prompted her students into action, exercising their computer literacy skills in a fundraising campaign for students at a school in South Sudan. And recently, Governor Cuomo and New York’s rollout of Common Core testing have been under fire. Cuomo, once a staunch supporter of teacher evaluation reform with the Common Core exam results as its measuring stick, publicly changed his position on April 1 after he signed the new $138 billion budget in Albany. Battling with how to best work with ebooks with all your kids? Don’t miss a free webcast on just that. SLJ’s Kathy Ishizuka will moderate as four librarians explore great approaches to “Using Ebooks to Serve Different Student Populations”—Wednesday, April 30, at 3 p.m. ET. |
