43
New partnership formed between Springfield High School and library
Photo
From left, Springfield High School senior Stephen Lyons, junior Shelby Romanchuk, senior Lexy Zubic and school librarian Amy Crowe show off the students’ new library cards. Students will use the public library instead of school computers to access academic databases — saving the district about $5,000 annually.
NEW SPRINGFIELD
A new partnership between Springfield High School and the Public Library of Youngstown and Mahoning County will help save the school district money and boost library circulation, officials say.
Several library employees spent four days at Springfield High School this month signing up the building’s roughly 375 students for library cards. The students will use the public library system to access academic journals instead of school computers, meaning the school will no longer have to pay for access to the journals.
The switch will save the district about $5,000 annually, said high school Principal Anthony DeFelice.
“It’s a pilot program,” said Janet Loew, the library’s public relations director. “We don’t have the ability to do a massive sign-up of kids all over the county.”
Loew said there were some computer glitches in the Springfield sign-ups and that the library is planning “to develop the capability to do this on a more broad scale.”
She also said the program benefits the library, as more people are using the databases and more teens have library cards.
“Teens are a hard-to-reach market, so we do welcome the opportunity for them to sign up. We lose kids when they get to that age,” Loew said.
Springfield High School senior Stephen Lyons is one of those teens. Lyons had a card when he was younger, but didn’t use it often. Now he has a new card for the first time in years.
“I will definitely use it, especially for English and history and history of sports,” he said.
And Lyons said he plans to visit his local library not just online for the databases, but in person now that he has a card.
School librarian Amy Crowe came up with the idea to use the public library to access academic databases when she used the system while earning her master’s degree in library sciences.
“Students will use [databases] for anything needing authoritative sources,” Crowe said.
DeFelice said now only incoming freshmen will need to get a library card, and if students lose their card, it is their responsibility to get a new one.
“With state budgets, we’ve been cutting back in tutors. With this savings, we’ll be able to retain some of them,” DeFelice said. “Anywhere we can pinch a penny, we will.”