Oak Park Middle School’s Melony LeMay, MLIS, can add “Librarian of the Year” to her already long list of credentials.
The school library media specialist was recently given this title for the 2012-2013 season after parents, students and teachers
nominated her.
“I consider it an honor and that I am
representing all the librarians in the area,” LeMay said. “I’m a big
advocate of information
literacy and students need to know how to use the library
properly.”
LeMay’s experience comes from 22 years of professional teaching experience, with 16 at Oak Park.
Getting students to read and use the library has been LeMay’s central focus. To prepare for that role, she returned to school
to get her master’s in Library & Information Science from LSU in 2011.
She also received a full scholarship
from the Project Recovery, Laura Bush Foundation. It recruits and
educates librarians
to help in communities that are short-staffed due to the flooding
and hurricane in 2005. LeMay is actively involved with both
the Louisiana Library Association and the American Library
Association. Those professional organizations have provided her
with outlets to work with other librarians across the state to
find ways to improve education for teens.
“She does things like having parent
volunteers come in and putting pictures of students on desktops so they
feel that they’re
important when they go in the library,” said Calcasieu Parish
School System Library consultant Helen Curol, MLIS. “She is
a can-do person; there is nothing too big or too small that she
says ‘I can’t do that’ — she tackles everything that anybody
asks her to do.”
On a local level, LeMay can be found
looking for new books that she thinks might interest students and
encourage them to read.
She incorporates parents into the reading system with family
reading nights and sponsors a School Library Club. Outside of
the school’s library, LeMay is continually involved with
reading-related events such as the Louisiana Association of Library
and Media Professionals, the Region 5 Technology & Training
Conference and the National Middle School Association.
For the students at her school LeMay
tries to not only instill a love of reading but provide a place they can
enjoy the books.
She decorates the library in a way that is both inviting and warm —
more like a coffee shop than simply a room with shelved
books.
Because of LeMay’s efforts, the school has seen positive results and during the 2011-2012 year had a per-capita average of
47 books read by students — the second-highest among middle schools.
Now she has been nominated through LLA for the LASL School Media Specialist of the Year to represent Calcasieu Parish. In
the meantime, she plans to continue making the library and its books a place students enjoy.
“I want to motivate them to read and to develop a lifelong love of reading and learning,” she said. “If you can discover what
a teen likes and what their interests are, you can get them hooked on reading — it’s a challenge to me.”