LISNews: Librarian News

Libraries hold key to Detroit progress
Detroit is looking in all the wrong places to explain its low reading scores and is ignoring the most obvious ("Detroit parents want DPS teachers, officials jailed over low test scores," Dec. 13). Jailing teachers, new reading initiatives and volunteer tutors are not the answer. The answer is improved school libraries staffed by certified librarians.

The parents told the school board that they were never asked or even told that their children’s librarian was going to write and use profanity as part of a lesson on controversial books.

However, when they heard what happened afterwards, from their 8th grade children In West Linn, OR, the upset parents said they were furious and in disbelief. They said the teacher exposed their kids to more than a dozen curse words (ed: I bet the kids could have taught her a few more).

“There was the “F-word” written on the board. The teacher yelled them at the kids and then asked the kids to yell them back at him," said parent Elizabeth Thiede. She also explained that her child was upset by the display that was apparently carried out as part of a language arts unit at Athey Creek Middle School.

For nearly 10 years, the school has discussed banned and controversial books as part of a successful First Ammendment curriculum. But never before has profanity been used in such a way, school district officials admitted.

NWCN.com has report and video.

A librarian from Mount Anthony Middle School in Vermont was recently banned from working in all Vermont schools for inappropriately using the Internet.

David Wohlsen, a prekindergarten through Grade 12 library media specialist, surrendered his teaching license to the state Department of Education earlier this month on the grounds that he "violated school policy on appropriate Internet use," according to an Education Department Web site posting.

According to the school district's policy, unacceptable use of the Internet is "threatening or obscene materials, antisocial behaviors like hate mail, harassment or discriminatory remarks, for profit or illegal activities, product advertisement, political lobbying, other non-academic uses and non-educational mailing lists."

According to a previous article in the Bennington Banner, Wohlsen had retired at the beginning of this school year.

The Rutland Herald reports.

The venerable boarding school west of Boston -- the first in the United States to admit both boys and girls -- last summer undertook another first: It began getting rid of most of the library's books. In their place: a fully digital collection.
Library watchers say it could be the first school library, public or private, to forsake
ink-and-paper in favor of e-books. It also represents the first time that a school has placed its students' intellectual lives so fully into the hands of a few online publishers and electronic-device makers.