South Meridian Elementary Community Analysis

School Community Analysis for South Meridian Elementary Library Learning Commons, Surrey School District 36

Prepared by: Teacher Librarian, Carly Monroe, September 22,2018

Goal: In order to provide the best learning resources available to us, we must look first to the dynamics of the student body and what is available to us through our surrounding community.

South Meridian Elementary is located at 16244 13^th Ave, Surrey BC.  It is situated at the far south end of the Surrey School District close to the ocean and United States border.  We are a feeder school into Earl Marriott Secondary School which is approximately 1 km away and serves roughly 2000 students.  South Meridian is roughly 2 km away from the White Rock Regional Library and 3 km from the Semiahmoo branch of the Surrey Public Library and surrounding White Rock/South Surrey city centre.  This year, our school has a registration of 330 students who for the most part continue to be enrolled as a stable school population. 

We have students attending our school who have immigrated from China, Iran, Philippines, Korea and the United Kingdom.  Languages spoken at home include 89% English and the other 11% a combination of Chinese, Mandarin, Punjabi, Korean, Spanish, Canton, Urdu, Arabic, Farsi and Hindi. 

We have 26 designated learners including 10 in special education, 8 with autism, 4 having physical or chronic challenges, 2 with intensive behaviour, 1 with moderate behaviour and 1 gifted student.  We have another 8 students who have accepted the Aboriginal Support Program of which 3 have other designations. 

I have not included all information provided to protect student and teacher privacy.  All images and information taken from Power BI analytics database                                (Karout and Ferrari, 2018)

As my own children have attended this school for the past year, I have a general opinion that this school community is non-transient and student enrolment remains quite stable.  In previous schools I have worked in, many students have had much less desirable situations in the home.  It appears that the majority of school families have supports in place for their children with a variety of home/work situations.  

•  both parents working with before and after care
•  one working, one staying at home 
•  one parent working with the other parent working part time 
•  work from home with the other parent staying at home 
•  single parent working with before and after care  

School sports that are popular amongst the students include cross country, track and field, basketball and volleyball.  Our students are highly involved in their own family recreation and sports programs and for this reason, extracurricular activities such as after school Mad Science and Bricks for Kids programs are not in high demand by our parents and do not take place.  Most children do however get to take part in extra- curricular activities through family finances.

The school makes use of reading programs in the classroom setting, Library Learning Commons (LLC) and with the learning support team.  Most teachers like to use the Reading and Writing Power program by Adrienne Gear and some also use Reading A to Z and Epic Books as a classroom digital tool to support learners in other ways.  Another program/tool we may look into this year is Scholastic Literacy Pro which I have heard positive feedback about.  I will be starting a reading club program which I have had tremendous success with in the past 3 years, called the Reading Link Challenge and is offered to grades 4 and 5 students.

After considering the questions Harvey poses in the Mardis article, with regards to best practice in school libraries, I wonder if some decisions I have made with regards to scheduling may not serve the needs of users best.  I realize there are other models I could have followed that allow circulation to be separate from instructional times, but at this late stage am not sure how I could go about changing that in our schedules.  As it stands, the LLC program runs on Monday, Tuesday half of Thursday and Friday and includes a fixed schedule with available flex time.  There is a weekly fixed schedule during teacher prep time where my classes come in for book exchange, literacy activities, digital projects, creation, and information and library skills.  There are additional book exchange times in the morning and after lunch most days that are available to everyone, however, I have yet to ensure that these open times are publicized to the school community.   

Additional collaboration opportunities can be scheduled at certain times for teachers and students.  Unlike Harvey, I like to have control of the collaboration calendar so that teachers know that I am a part of the collaboration process.  I like to speak with each person who wants to collaborate to ensure we are communicating needs, and I can contribute appropriate resources and expertise.  I am also happy to have the space used without my being a part of collaboration if that is what is needed.  I would like to include other activities such as reading clubs and lunchtime games and will see how things go in the coming months as I am the only LLC staff that works in the school.

As an elementary school, our LLC is not large enough to have two classes engaging with similar types of activities, however, there are some flexible options, as Harvey suggests.  Classes can be doubled up for a portion of a lesson or activity and then can be moved to continue back in their classroom.  Tables can be moved to open up the space for a larger audience or activity to take place such as an author presentation.  A class could come in to do book exchange while another class is working.  It is also possible to accommodate small groups of students working if they had headphones to block out noise or were inside the small resource room that is off to one side of the LLC.  

I try to work closely with teachers so I can design literacy activities that align their classroom studies with some of my library activities.  Last year grades 4 and 5 students were are learning about energy sources.  I suggested a collaborative project that introduced green screen technology to both the students and their teacher.  During library time we explored print and digital resources to find information for their topics and in collaboration periods students created news reports about their topics.  Being in a new school, I do not yet have the relationships with teachers or know about their backgrounds and specialities.  I have included a questionnaire that I made with some suggestions of questions taken from the readings that I would like to send out with hopes of better supporting teachers in the future. 

I am starting to see how "community" is a prevalent theme at this school that needs to be well represented within the library collection.  For this reason, I have chosen Grade 1 Socials Studies as an area to focus on for collection development.  I think it will provide me with a deeper understanding of the community in which our school is located.  The South Meridian PAC does an excellent job of building school community and supporting school programs and activities by organizing fundraising events.  At the moment their goal is to replace an old playground with something more exciting for the students to play on.  They hold regular dinner and movie nights, fun runs, hot lunch to raise money for this goal.  Through these fundraisers students could be able to see how their actions can shape their environment and how strong communities can be created which are two of the 3 Big Ideas in this curriculum.  

Grade 1 Socials Studies Big Ideas:

• We shape the local environment, and the local environment shapes who we are and how we live.
• Our rights, roles and responsibilities are important for building strong communities.
• Healthy communities recognize and respect the diversity of individuals and care for local environment

Curriculum Content:

• characteristics of the local community that provide organization and meet the needs of the community
• diverse cultures, backgrounds and perspectives within the local and other communities
• relationships between a community and its environment
• roles, rights and responsibilities in the local community
• key events and developments in the local community, and in local First Peoples communities
• natural and human made features of the local environment

Key Skills:

• Recognize that maps are used to represent real places and relate pictorial representations to their physical locations.
• Follow a path to a destination using pictorial representation (eg., picture map).
• Access information from audio, visual, material or print sources.
• Collect information from personal experiences, oral sources, and visual representations.
• Make comparisons to discover similarities and differences
• With teacher prompts, make simple interpretations from information gathered (eg., families have similar needs, families have differences). 
• Use oral, written, or visual communication forms to accomplish given presentation tasks (eg., show and tel, captioned pictures).
• Brainstorm, discuss, and compare possible solutions to a selected problem.

Local Partnerships/Resources to support inquiry:

Here is a Symbaloo web mix of potential local resources that I created based on Lamb and Johnson's community analysis recommendations.  It will support further analysis and be a resource to support inquiry of community in the Grade 1 Socials Studies curriculum.

Surrey Public Library, Semiahmoo branch 

• Free online use of more than 60 databases with personal Library membership card
• Library Tours can support and enhance curricular competencies and be tailored to individual student and teacher needs, highlight the importance of story in personal, family and community identity, introduce students and families to free and welcoming community resources, and users can discover books on a variety of personal interests.
• Program called READ-Ability including organizations CELA – Centre for Equitable Library Access and NNELS – National Network for Equitable Library Services which together work to support students who need supports with reading.
• Programs that support teen literacy include: Young Adult Writing Contest, Teen Summer Adventure, Library Council, Book Review Project, Book Clubs, Supporting Teen Moms, Supporting Teen Writers, and volunteer opportunities
• The Neighbourhood Series promotes safety in our communities as well as respect for diverse cultures within our communities which is another Big Idea. (Surrey Public Libraries presentation, 2018) 

White Rock Train Station Museum is an excellent resource to compare pictures of the community over time.

Surrey Fire Department and RCMP have offered to come to our school to present to students their roles and responsibilities in our community

Sunday Market featuring would be a weekend field trip students could visit to see the variety of local produce, goods and services created by members of our community

A Produce Market and Turkey specialty shop are the closest businesses to the school half a block away and could make for some interesting partnership opportunities. 

The idea of community resides in the K-4 Socials Studies curriculum with varied levels of study.  Therefore, the people who are potentially making use of this collection each year include between 50 Grade 1's to 250 K- Grade 4's, their teachers, EA's, some parents and myself.  Students are encouraged to sign out a few books each week during their class period with me in the LLC.  Teachers request resources to be available in their classrooms that support whatever area of inquiry they are examining.  Some teachers ensure their students are signing out one fiction and one nonfiction type of book to promote different types of reading.  I like to try to get students to sign out different kinds of books, and for this reason I think I will focus on educating myself, students and teachers more about e-books and the procedure for signing them out.  The collection of e-books is growing steadily and many times students are able to find something more current in this type of format.

With the research I have conducted analyzing our school community, it is my hope that I will be able to better support the learning needs of our students, and the instructional needs of our teachers.  Without having scanned the collection of what already exists, I have a better understanding of the types of students who will be accessing these resources.  It is without a doubt that the resources that I have curated will assist in offering different types of learning opportunities for our students.

Works Cited:

Karout, Anna-Maria., and Ferrari, Alberto et all. “Power BI Analytics Software.” Surrey Schools Demographics, 2018.

Daniel, Evelyn. Where Have All the Gophers Gone? Why the Web Beat Gopher in the Battle for Protocol Mind Share, Davidson County Public Library System, Thomasville, NC, 1996, ils.unc.edu/daniel/241/241asn2-analysis.html.

Harvey, Carl A., and Linda L. Mills. Leading the Common Core Initiative: a Guide for K-5 School Librarians. Libraries Unlimited, 2015.

Mardis, Marcia A., and Phyllis Van Orden. The Collection Program in Schools: Concepts and Practices. Libraries Unlimited, an Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2016.

Lamb, Annette, and Larry Johnson. “Library Media Program: Community Analysis.” Acquisitions and Management of Knowledge and Information, School Library Media Specialist, 2014, eduscapes.com/sms/program/community.html.

Youth Services., “How the Surrey Libraries Offer Support.”. Surrey Schools TL Workshop, 6 Sept. 2018, Surrey, British Columbia, Resource Education Centre