District receives grant
COPENHAGEN — The Copenhagen Central School District has been awarded a $135,000 federal grant for library improvement.
"We have a lot of things built in there that are exciting," District Superintendent Mary-Margaret U. Zehr said.
The grant-funded project, which school officials dubbed "A Library With No Limits," will include increasing student and community access to the library during after-school, evening and summer hours, beginning in the fall, according to a district release.
Grant funding also will be used to bolster both print and non-print collections, including DVDs, large-text books and graphic novels, Mrs. Zehr said.
"Outdated and undersized library collections in critical areas will be replaced or enhanced with resources to meet the needs of all students in achieving high academic standards across a range of content areas," the release says.
District officials also plan to integrate the use of so-called talking books, partly through subscriptions to Internet download services, and add 20 laptop computers and a ELMO digital projector. Talking books would "increase access to high-quality literature for students and adults with special needs," according to the district release.
Part of the grant funding also is to be used to incorporate the "Big6" model of teaching information and technology skills in the prekindergarten-through-grade-12 curriculum.
That effort, which will include sending several staffers to a summer training session and bringing Big6 officials to the school to work with teachers, should provide students with a more consistent approach to research, Mrs. Zehr said.
Other grant funding will be used to purchase books to restart a book club program for students and adults and to bring in visiting authors, she said.
The grant, applied for by library media specialist Krisha Greene, came through the U.S. Department of Education's Improving Literacy Through School Libraries grant program.
Fifty-seven school districts — six of them in New York — were awarded $18.5 million through the program.
