By Staff Writer: Marissa VanDaelen
Libraries are an important part of many schools and can be incredibly useful for students. Howell High School’s media center definitely has benefits with computers that anyone is free to use and numerous books that are free to borrow. However, sometimes the amount of computers is scarce and it seems that some of the books aren’t getting much attention anymore. Mrs. Julie Morga and Mrs. Sandee Lofgren are trying their hardest to make positive improvements to the media center.
“We’re just making changes according to what’s been happening over the last few years as far as technology goes and things like that. We’re really trying to make sure that we have enough computers for everybody when they need them,” Mrs. Morga says.
Keeping up with technology is certainly a difficult task, especially in the world today where it never stops advancing. The media center has recently invested in eight Kindle Fire tablets that students can now use in the media center and even check out.
“The Kindles are nice. It’ll be good because we’re going to download books on them and sometimes we’d have students want to read an entire series of books, like the Twilight series, and it can be hard when they’re trying to read them right in a row but then one’s missing. So we’d really like to download those so that then they can take a Kindle and they can have all of them,” Mrs. Morga says.
Likewise, Mrs. Morga and Mrs. Lofgren are trying to get more modern books put into the media center. If any student has a suggestion of a book or books they’d like to see in the library, they can bring it up to either of them.
“This school was built in the ‘80s and so a lot of our stuff is just old and outdated. So just trying to keep up with it is hard to do because we don’t want to get rid of some really good literature, but at the same time, the times are changing and student interests are changing so it’s important to keep them interested in what they’re reading,” Mrs. Morga says.
In addition, Mrs. Morga and Mrs. Lofgren are trying to make the media center more inviting in general. They’re putting various quotes on the walls that they hope to be moving. Students can suggest quotes they want to see in the media center as well.
“We’re just trying to find quotes that are inspiring to kids and we want to try to motivate them to want to do more in school. We’re also just trying to decorate and make it a little more inviting in here,” Mrs. Morga says.
Furthermore, Mrs. Morga and Mrs. Lofgren are working on potentially having a pretty famous author and actress come to the school and do a book signing.
“We would like to have Melissa Gilbert come here but we haven’t really talked to her yet. We’re hoping that we can get her to talk to kids about the experience of writing a book or working and acting,” Mrs. Morga says.
Melissa Gilbert starred as Laura Ingalls on the hit television show Little House on the Prairie and is the author of Prairie Tale: A Memoir.
“We’re hoping, if it happens, that we could get her in the auditorium so we can get a lot of classes in there. We have a lot of plans that we’d like to do but we don’t know if we can just carry them all out,” Mrs. Lofgren says.
