Tell a Story

Once Upon a School's mission is to inspire community involvement with local schools. Tell us, as clearly and briefly as you can, how you or someone you know used his skills and expertise to make a teacher's life easier. Point out how your project connected the private world with a public school and let us know what you would do differently next time.

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Contact information
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About the school
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  • Subject
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Your story title
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Your plan*

Tell us what your original idea was. What made you decide this was important to get involved? What problem(s) were you trying to solve?

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    When we took a tour of our daughter's elementary school on a PTA night, my wife and I were pleased to see how well stocked the library was. But after talking to the librarian, we found out that because of staffing cuts, there wasn't enough time to help all the kids navigate their way through the stacks and find the books they were looking for. Because of this, some kids would get frustrated and often leave without having checked out a book. We wanted to do something to make sure the students could make the most of the library and encourage their love of reading.
What you did*

What key steps did you take? Who got involved? Did you have to find funding? What actually happened?

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    We decided to get together a small group of volunteers who could come into the library and help the kids familiarize themselves with the library. First, we contacted the school librarian and talked with him about what schedule would work best for him and what sort of guidance we should be giving the students. After a couple of after school meetings between the volunteers (all parents) and the librarian, we set up a schedule where twice a month one of us comes in and leads a class through the library, showing the kids where all the different types of books are kept, how they're organized, and how to use the library computer for help. The students were incredibly responsive to the orientation, and given the librarian's already huge workload, made it possible to educate more kids sooner about using the library.
Results*

Who was affected by this project? What change did it make for the school? For the students? For the teachers?

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    A couple of things have happened since. One, the number of books checked-out in the past six months has grown by 20 percent. And two, it has started a conversation between us and the librarian about the school's other book-related needs. The support he's received from our volunteering has sparked an excitement for other library projects that would tie in with curriculum from the various classes.
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Mina Huh
Kensington, CA