School Library Musings: A Day in the Life of a Library Tech (Part 1)

For more than thirty years, Denise Britton has worked at a small, rural school in Sonoma County, California. She started as a substitute yard supervisor, helped in the kitchen serving meals, and then settled into the paraprofessional role of instructional assistant.

A fixture in the school community (she lives nearby, her children attended school there, and now her grandchildren are students there), she is well-known as a local mover and shaker—someone who gets things done. When the job of library tech opened up a year ago, Denise jumped at the opportunity and, over the past year, has transformed the library into the physical and emotional heart of the school.

Traditional expectations of school libraries fill her days. All transitional kindergarten (TK) through fifth-grade classes are scheduled for half-hour visits every week, and middle school classes come in as needed for recreational reading. Denise holds book fairs to fund book purchases (there is no allocated book budget for the library), maintains the automated database, and promotes books to students through book displays and booktalks.

She does her best to engage and inspire students to be readers, learners, and teachers themselves. For example, she recently had the older classes read picture books among themselves, then write their own picture books, and read them aloud to the kindergarten students. Everyone, including Denise, loved that project.

Clearly, Denise loves her job. “It is so wonderful to see students come in and be excited about discovering a new book, to see them looking at books together, and having these discovery moments on their own,” she says. “They especially love looking through the atlases!” 

And as a big proponent of using available resources, she draws on the ones most readily available. “Kids help with everything,” she says cheerfully, so while her young helpers check books in and out during class visits, she is freed up to help students find the books they want.

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But wait! In addition to these daily tasks that almost every library tech across the nation is doing, here’s what else Denise does:

• Supervises students who drop in to do classwork throughout the day
• Provides a lucky few fifth graders with additional one-on-one support twice weekly
• Oversees PALS assistance dogs Charlotte and Minerva, who meet weekly with fourth graders—in the library, of course—to have stories read to them
• Does yard duty mornings and afternoons, every day
• Coteaches a leadership class with the school counselor four days a week, part of the middle school enrichment program
• Stays late during conferences because, she says, “The library should be seen and accessible to everyone.”

Denise’s accessibility and availability to teachers are apparent. For instance, she bought a Lego table for the library with her Scholastic Book Fair points. Now, if a child is struggling in class, a teacher will call up and ask if they can send the student over for a little Lego table time—with Denise, of course, supervising. Oh, and she also serves as president of the local chapter of the school’s classified employees union.

Denise's work isn’t just a job; it is her calling.

She seems to thrive on all this activity, though she is most animated when describing her direct interaction with students, and she strongly believes in encouraging student voice. “The leadership class is all about student equity,” she says, and proudly describes their projects. “They organized a basketball event as a community-building project, they maintain display cases on campus highlighting our monthly ‘Character Strong’ adjective or sharing other schoolwide information, and recently made posters to educate the student body on how to wash hands properly.”

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Fortunately, she hasn’t yet had to face any book challenges from her collection, though she was worried for a while last year. “There was a negative reaction to a particular book, but luckily, that family moved out of the area, and things died down.” The district does not yet have a library policy in place to support library personnel in the event of book challenges.

This year, there are fewer instructional assistants on staff. However, library time for students remains intact, which Denise says attests to the value her school places on both the library and the literacy work that happens there every day.

What is her goal as a library tech? “To spark new interests in students’ lives, to integrate the monthly, schoolwide themes into library visits, and to have books that kids can connect with.” She gleefully describes a student shouting, “That’s the language we speak at home!” during a local author’s visit to share her book A Year of Celebraciones. “I want to have books in the library that help bring all the disparate pieces of the students’ lives together,” says Denise.

That library sits in the geographic center of the school campus, and students and teachers often just pass through it on their way to somewhere else. “I take that as a compliment, “ says Denise. “People like coming here; we are filling a void. It’s been so fun!”

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