Tomorrow I head to Ohio for the Virginia Hamilton Conference, so today is filled with much rushing about and checking off of to-do lists.
Thing the first: post this video.
Here’s a short video of me explaining why every school must have a library and a qualified librarian to students at my local high school.
Here are the pull quotes:
"School libraries are not luxuries, they are the foundations of our culture."
On the fact that math scores are up across the country, but reading scores are not: "We haven’t asked parents to volunteer to teach our algebra classes… we haven’t fired math teachers and let kids to figure it out on the Internet, but we’ve closed libraries and fired librarians, who are the central figure of literacy in any school."
I quoted Ben Franklin: "The only thing that is more expensive than education is ignorance."
My dream: "Let’s fight to make sure that every school in American has an amazing library staffed with an incredible librarian."
Thank you very much to everyone who made my morning at Mexico High School possible; especially Principal Donald Root, Librarian Nancy Nicholson, and teacher Mike Charbonneau, who did such a fantastic job with the video production. Go Tigers!