Beginning the Year With Two Libraries

I honestly thought I had it together for the 24-25 school year. I was wrong. Thus, A Tale of Two Libraries is born. You'll still find the occasional review, but my plan is to chronicle my experiences as a dual campus librarian. 

At the end of last school year, we found out that librarian positions were being cut in half. We would be supporting two campuses each. I was furious and broken hearted. Having to compete for my job against people I liked and respected... zero stars, would not repeat the experience. I feel very lucky that I retained my campus and added another with an administrator who knows and supports my endeavors as a school librarian. I'm also glad to have a coordinator and director at the district level who fights tooth and nail for the district's librarians. Our directive was that we would alternate weeks spent at each campus.

So, back to the beginning of the year--writing from week four's perspective, I had a few flops. Here's what happened and what I plan to do differently next year. 

1. I wasn't flexible enough with my time and planning--I started check out rotations during week two with the assumption that both campuses would want to keep their regular rotation they had last year. I should have scheduled all classes to come on one campus for a 20 minute orientation/badge photo session and then did the same with the other campus the following week. Starting checkout on week three after determining the needs would have gotten everyone on the same page and gotten student badges done more quickly.
• I have now polled my teachers and am making a more flexible schedule based on their responses (shout out to my library squad for always sharing ideas).
2. Organization - I'm organized with my time, but I wasn't organized enough. Though I have everything in my planner and created a color coded calendar for where I was each week, I still needed the flexibility to make changes to my schedule based on teacher requests for lessons or point of need events (MAP Testing, for example). I finally put where I was each day on my Outlook calendar so that I could change it as needed and see it on the calendar with all of the other various campus events. This helped immensely because I color code my planner as well and would prefer not to have to resort to whiteout or pencil.
3. Teacher Training - I wanted to clearly state my expectations for library visits at the beginning of the year. I only had a short amount of time to convey this messaging, so I opted to wait to train teachers on the library system so that they wouldn't have to reschedule if library staff were out sick. Which is exactly what happened during the first Monday of checkout while I was at the other campus. Lesson learned--make sure teachers know how to check books in and out!
4. Work life balance - I've been really good at this for awhile, but I still felt so overwhelmed during the first two weeks of campus PD/prep time and during the first two weeks of school with students. In order to maintain my sanity and keep my blood pressure from soaring, I have not begun any after school programming besides making sure the library is open for checkout when I am on campus that day.
• I post after school hours that are printed on two sides so that I can just flip the sign each week.
• I'm coordinating with my counseling teams and parent liaisons to add literacy promotions to before school events like Grandparents' Day breakfast and our All Pro Dads meetings.

Some of my upcoming plans include coordinating with my middle school librarian team to host online mini PD sessions so that we're sharing the burden of sharing our expertise with campus staff.