Blue Ridge School to be 'more awesome' with grant-funded media center improvements

Aug. 1—The Blue Ridge School library is getting a makeover courtesy of a former first lady.

Blue Ridge officials learned earlier this year the school is one of 205 schools from 43 states across the country to receive a $5,000 grant through the Laura Bush Foundation for America's Libraries.

"We were definitely excited, and it came as a complete surprise," said Christine Long, Blue Ridge's principal. "It's pretty cool."

"I feel very grateful, and it'll be like Christmas when all the books get here," said Courtney Taylor, the school's media specialist. "We usually spend about $2,500 on books at the end of the year, and now we're getting double that without having to use any of our budget."

Recipients of this round of grants have outdated library collections, averaging approximately 20 years old, according to Dalton Public Schools. The Laura Bush Foundation for America's Libraries supports school libraries with the greatest needs in order to encourage students to develop a love of reading and learning, and since its inception in 2002, it has awarded more than $16 million to more than 2,800 schools across the country.

"It's so important for libraries to change as student interests change, to keep up with trends," Long said. "It's a little outdated right now (the school's library), and we're going to try really, really hard" to have the revamped library/media center ready for the start of the coming school year.

"Kids are really into graphic novels, now, so we grabbed a lot of those" with this grant, and "two genres we're really beefing up are our dual language (titles) and audiobooks," Taylor said. "We have a small shelf already of audiobooks, and the kids love them, but they're really expensive, like $50 or more (per) book."

Blue Ridge will expand its Dual Language Immersion program to first grade in 2021-22 after starting with prekindergarten in 2019-20 and then adding kindergarten in 2020-21, Long said.

"We need more dual language titles, but also just more books (with themes) of diversity and inclusivity."

Blue Ridge is one of several schools in the Dalton Public Schools system with dual language programs, in which students are immersed in the target language at least half of their day, according to Maria Rodriguez, who teaches in Westwood School's program. In Dalton Public Schools, math, literacy and science are taught in the target language, while language arts and social studies are in English.

"We have room, now, for all those" different new books, as "we did a big weeding last year of a bunch of old books," Taylor said. "We did a report of all the titles that hadn't been checked out in at least 10 years," then removed those books from the library to free up space.

Blue Ridge's $5,000 grant will be supplemented by the school's funds, as well as community donations, as Long hopes to give the media center a complete makeover, from new paint on the walls to mobile book cases.

"We could move those (book cases) around to suit our needs and use the space better," she said. "We want to make it into a modern media center."

And those efforts are part of a larger literacy push at the school, she said.

"We are going to come out of the gates strong, not wasting a moment, on the first day" of the new school year "with a strong literacy focus."

"Vocabulary acquisition is huge, and that will be infused (everywhere), because if you don't understand the vocabulary, you won't understand the content," she said. "If you can't read and write, it's difficult to do anything else."

All of that begins with "getting kids hooked on reading, and you do that by (offering) books they want to read, because that sparks an interest in reading for the rest of their lives," Taylor said. "Blue Ridge was already awesome, but we're about to make it more awesome with all these" library/media center improvements.