READ: Amanda Jones and Diane Mokuau Named 2021 School Librarians of the Year That spirit, attitude, and ability to keep students feeling like part of a community during a pandemic earned Jones SLJ’s 2021 School Librarian of the Year award. “I just wanted them to have an escape when stuck at home,” she says. She’d mastered that technology a few days before. Wearing a beret, this 43-year-old librarian took about 100 students to Paris via Zoom, Google slides, and VR. Still, on her first day at home, she started hatching plans to keep the school’s 720 fifth and sixth graders connected during the pandemic.įour days later, she debuted “Journeys with Jones,” a program where she escorted students (and any tagalong siblings and parents) on virtual trips, starting with the Palace of Versailles in France. She consoled herself saying that what she thought would be a “two-week break” would be a welcome respite from school. Jones remembers feeling lost without the daily connection to her students in the 1,800-square-foot library. With holes drilled in the wall leading to an internal courtyard, Jones set up a spot where bees could fly through tubes and students could study everything from pollination to hexagons to how Egyptians used honey medicinally.īut all those activities halted in March 2020, when the coronavirus stopped in-person education at the school, located in Denham Springs, LA, a rural town with only two stoplights. And in a corner painted yellow, there was an actual beehive. Pre-COVID, students buzzed in, did STEM activities in the makerspace, met with one another, took out books, and completed homework assignments. "Multitasking In Molokai: Diane Mokuau, 2021 School Librarian of the Year"Īmanda Jones’s library at Live Oak Middle School is typically a hive of activity.
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