Ridge View High School

For my fouth interview, I spoke with Aria King (who is a high school librarian at Ridgeview High School) about the shared foundation of "Collaborate". A list of interview questions can be found here.

Ridgeview High School is a 9-12th grade school in Columbia, South Carolina that serves around 1,600 students. They have a few magnet schools within their high school (Art, Business, AVID). It is also about 89% African American.

For Aria, a large part of the Collaborate Shared Foundation looks at how the library collaborates with other teachers in the building. The biggest part of this is that the librarians are always looking to promote the library. They approach different teachers in the building and actively seek out ways to promote collaboration and look for ways that they can support the teachers (especially during PEP time in the mornings). They also have a couple of programs that they use like Book Tastings and Freshman Orientations to help promote the library.

Another big part of the collaborate shared foundation is that the school has two librarians. Both of these librarians have special areas that they focus on. This allows them to better share their expertise. For example, Aria's teammate is in charge of National History Day with the school. She is also in charge of the Maker Space.

Finally, one thing that is important to Aria is to emphasize the utility of the library to teachers. She has worked hard so that teachers know that the library is for more than just research, more than just English classes. For example, they are about to open a Teddy Bear Clinic that will be collaborating with Health and Science to promote a better understanding of the body.

One of the things that I realized when speaking with Aria (and in my observations from school library visits) is that English classes are really the only regular users of the library. As a librarian, it is my job to figure out how to connect teachers of other subjects to the library. My internship librarian has worked very hard at this type of out of the box thinking. For example, she has teamed up with the Forensics teacher to create a breakout room that students complete for their final exam for that science class. She has also curated boardgames for the ESOL teachers to use with their students to encourage conversations (games like Guess Who when they are working on adjectives). So being able to think outside the box and think about the library in terms other than in "just books" or research tools is key to reaching some of these other teachers that would not usually use the library.