After reviewing our school’s population data, results have shown an increase in Spanish speaking students. With this, the media center put their effort towards making our library’s collection more compatible for our students.

Heather Fields, media specialist aims to have more diverse novels in the library in order to represent our school’s students.

“We really wanted our fiction collection to be an accurate representation of our population at our school,” Fields said. “We really want our students to walk in and feel like they can see themselves in the media center and in the books that we have to offer.”

The media center purchased 60 Spanish language novels in the first quarter.
With the purchase of these novels, Fields hopes to allow Spanish speaking students to get the full experience of what is offered in the library.

“Our number one goal as a media program is to make sure that we’re serving our staff and our students and all of their needs, and we really felt like we were lacking in titles written in Spanish,” Fields said. “We felt like we were doing that population of our school a disservice. And so that was our main goal. We want every student at our school to be able to walk into the library and find something that they can read.”

To appeal to Spanish speaking students, Fields chooses novels with titles and authors popular to both English and Spanish literary cultures.

“We tried to include titles that are popular in English, for instance “The Fault in our Stars”, by John Green and books by Sara Dessen,” Fields said. “But we also tried to find Spanish books that were by Hispanic authors. So, I think there’s a really good mix in the collections.”
In addition to adding Spanish titles to the library, Fields is also focusing on bringing in novels involving more diverse characters.

“So in addition to adding Spanish novels, we also noticed that we didn’t have a representative percentage of books who features non-white characters or LBGTQ characters that dealt with issues that our students are dealing with,” Fields said. “And we wanted to make sure that they can find books about those issues or feature people who are non white or not the majority in our collection.”