Tomorrow is my last day of work as a school librarian. I’m retiring, finally! I know it seems odd to leave in the middle of the school year, but this is the earliest that I could make it work. I still love my job, but I’m tired of being tied to the school calendar and the school clock (7 am start times! Yikes!) Also, I’m tired of beating my head against the wall between me and effective collaboration with our teachers.

My husband has been retired for 12 years already. He was in law enforcement, so he could retire at an earlier age.  We love camping and being outdoors, especially in Maine. We’re really looking forward to being able to travel in the middle of the week, during the seasons when the weather is really beautiful. Working from home during the pandemic reminded me of how much I like being home–that was a little taste of what retirement might be like. I don’t expect to ever be bored, between camping, reading, and virtual world explorations.

Libraries: If you don’t use it, it will leave

We have a beautiful library with a wonderful book collection and a very capable and tech-savvy instructional partner (if I do say so myself). All of these are vastly underused. I understand many of the reasons for this–the standardized testing atmosphere pervading public schools in the U.S., the lack of time to “cover the material”, the reluctance to let someone else into the classroom–but it does a disservice to our students, who are badly in need of what the library has to offer (information literacy, media literacy, and the love of stories, for starts). I think maybe my personality doesn’t mesh well with some of our teachers, and I hope they will collaborate more with our next librarian.

This goes for books, too. A school library is a living collection, not an archive. We take a hard look at circulation statistics when weeding a collection. If something has not been checked out in several years, out it goes. It’s hard to remove books from a collection that are years old but still in  pristine condition, especially when I purchased them myself, but there isn’t room on the shelves for things that aren’t used by the patrons – they’re just clutter that obscures the valuable things.

Thanks for the memories!

I have many, many wonderful memories of my time in this and other libraries, and I’m grateful to have the opportunity. I’ve worked with a lot of talented, hard-working teachers, enthusiastic, caring students, and the best library colleagues a person could ask for. Like I always say, it’s a good gig, if you can get it!