If someone told you there was a way to make your schoolwork easier, would you take a second from your texting to listen? Probably. But if someone said that resource is the school library, odds are most students would dismiss the idea. Students do not truly appreciate what an asset the school library is for them, and they should.
Students need books for any manner of reasons, be they research, pleasure reading, or something entirely different. Students do not truly appreciate how lucky they are to have access to the school library. They do not use it for check out, electing instead to use the computers for research when a book would do just as well. They stay at the tables and do homework, ignoring the books all around them.
There are around 80-100 students that use the library each day, according to Emily Coklan, library media specialist. But in a school with over 2,000 students, that number is quite low, especially considering not all of them are taking advantage of their time.
“Unfortunately, during lunch periods, you do get a lot of students trying to use [the library] for social purposes,” Coklan said. “During the non-lunch periods, I’d say primarily it’s used for academic, and then the kind of third tier is students using it to check out books and materials.”
While students socialize, they might as well grab a book. Although it is good students use the library to work on homework, a library’s primary purpose is to check out books.
“I just try to really be on top of what’s new, who are the popular authors, what’s getting checked out here, and what students read more of. That’s nice where I have a circulation system where I can go on and see what our top fifty checkouts are,” Coklan said, “so I’ll know what the popular topics and authors are and try to get more things similar to it.”
Often, the school library has new releases faster than the Ela Library, so if a student is looking for a popular new novel, the school library is more likely to have it. However, students often do not consider the school library before planning a trip to the Ela Library.
“I would imagine [students] probably go there [to the Ela Library] more often, maybe, than the regulars come in here,” Dawn Scarbeck, library assistant, said, “but I think we have a lot of choices that they might not have at the time.”
The school does not just have fiction and non-fiction; there are poetry anthologies, short stories, graphic novels, even e-books and audiobooks. There are plenty of choices to suit anyone’s fancy. The library is there; students need to use it.
