Get out of the library
No, not your patrons — you! Today I finally had 2 volunteers come into the library during the first hour so I could leave the library and take care of problems throughout the building. Yes, I do have a technician who is supposed to be handling all broken equipment, etc. With him being divided into 10 schools and having his priorities dictated, it doesn’t look good that he will be coming back to actually finish fixing things any time soon. He’s a great guy, it’s the politics of prioritizing. Volunteers enabled me to
** dash to the office to pick up the Oriental Trading company delivery for our bookfair
** slip into a teacher’s room with a spare USB mouse from my house so she could do A.R.
** run the gradekeeper.com codes to three teachers so they could enter grades on a Mac while they are waiting for the program to be installed on their PC’s
** deliver new board books to preschool vision blended classrooms and autistic classrooms
** collaborate with a new teacher
** welcome the new kindergarten teacher who just started today
** remind the kindergartners that their teacher will call me to come read to them right before dismissal if they behave
** deliver some preview books from Scholastic to my best readers and ask them to help me book talk
** deliver some books on Egypt to the art teachers before they left for their field trip with all 2nd-4th graders and teach the students quickly how to locate these when they return to the library
** comfort a teacher who had received some bad news about her family
** locate the school newspaper
** move 4 broken computers into the library and record their serial numbers on help tickets so the district delivery person will pick them up (won’t come unless I go and put them in my office)
** move out one iMac to a classroom so the teacher could continue to A.R> with her students
** walk a teacher through diagnostics when the A.R. and STAR program doesn’t work
** encourage two teachers to gather their ideas for grant writing later this week
** hand one teacher her Mary Kay order
** teach one teacher how to take the federally mandated survey and how to use the internet
** clear the photocopy jam for the custodians
** bring several groups of students down to the library for quick instruction and research
** reschedule and teach four classes of 4th grade students so they can complete the magazine scavenger hunt and check out these periodicals
** drink my coffee
** collect the P.T.A. fundraising forms
Hooray for volunteers. Some of those jobs could have been done by others, but my slipping in and out of rooms truly raises morale. Teachers share more, ask more, and expect more. Students increase their desire to come to the library. Administrators see me collaborating and helping teachers.
I love volunteers.
