Community Service Leaders Meeting

Today was the first proper meeting of all the community service leaders. The community service leaders met together with their supervisors in the SMPR and discussed the plans for the first semester. Topics included how the services would deal withe the major problems of attendance, absences, writing an individual student report on their service, Service blogs, Key Club and any other subjects that applied to the individual community service.

Skylor and I attended this meeting but were not able to meet Ms. Reina to discuss issues we felt needed to be addressed. However we will go to her before library service begins and go over our plan for the first semester.

Unlike last year, Skylor and I have decided to limit and divide up the library service students. Last year about 14 students attended library service making the workload small for everyone and caused the service to end early. We decided to let in about 8-10 students who we think would be willing to work.

Before all students were obliged to organize books. However we felt that it shouldn't apply to everyone. We decided to split the service from grades 6-8 into one group and 9-11 in another group. I will be taking the grade 6-8 group and Skylor the 9-11. The younger group will be responsible for most books (non fiction) because it is easier to sort out. The older group will be responsible for sorting fiction books or magazines, making labels for books, and taking care of the library service blog. We both agreed that it is essential to get the library service blog up and running to communicate to parents and the school community of what we're doing. We think that the type of work and workload posed on the two different aged groups is appropriate and efficient.

Today we focused on how we will conduct the first session of library service. We want to introduce library service to our group and lay out ground rules on attendances/absences (since it was a big problem last year) and encourage more interest into library service. I really want to interact more with our students to build a better relationship and hopefully make them look forward to community and service every Thursday.

Another big issue Skylor and I discussed was the event of Book Week coming around the end of first semester. Last year we felt that Book Week did not get enough publicity and ultimately did not live up to what it could have. We began planning out what we could do to raise the popularity of Book Week and make students excited for the most beautiful week of school! Examples are sending out more news letters, coming up with promotional videos, having more reading days, cosplays of favorite book characters and perhaps publish creative writing pieces made by students. We have great ideas and are really excited to see how it goes!

Lastly a topic that the community service wanted to go over as a whole was the idea of community leaders writing student reports and student reflections. Since at the end of the year most report cards do not address the service aspect we're deciding on making service reports on each individual. Skylor and I really want to make personal reports on each individual's performances in library service. We also want students to make their own reflections to allow them to discover and reflect on what they did and make them feel good about doing something for the community!

We have a lot planned for library service this year! We're willing to spend a lot of time and put in a lot of effort to making this year a fun and enjoyable service.