Overdue School Library Books & How to Handle Student Excuses

Posted on August 30, 2019 by Barbara Paciotti

Every year, about a month after school begins, School Librarians begin to tackle the recurring and everlasting problem of students with overdue library books. Each school seems to have its own special problems and each librarian contrives some unique solutions. There is, however, one constant for all of us: the clichéd excuses students offer about their overdue library book.

The excuses students give us for not returning books can be especially troublesome when they’re at the circulation desk and we’re trying to check out books for 30—or 60—students before the end of a period. However, if we understand the underlying cause of these overdue excuses, we can respond calmly and more productively. No matter if you are elementary, middle school, or high school, when we tell a student they have an overdue library book, the ‘reasons’ offered come in 3 forms: avoidance, blame, or contrition.

AVOIDING THE PROBLEM OF AN OVERDUE BOOK

An avoidance response is non-confrontational, and we don’t want to escalate it. We just need to provide a simple prompt to give the student a possible solution. Here’s how I handle 4 common avoidance excuses:

	This is a classic, spur-of-the-moment avoidance response. I tell the student the date the book was checked out, grab one of my handy overdue bookmarks, write the book title, and slip the bookmark into the new book as I check it out. When I hand the book to the student I ask them to ‘look in their locker and at home, and get it back to me as soon as they find it.’
	This is probably the truth, and why the book is overdue. I follow the same bookmark procedure and tell them I’m sure they’ll find it if they look around their locker and at home.
	With this excuse the student is embarrassed and doesn’t want us to make a big deal about it. I gently remind them I scanned their ID badge or they entered their ID number on the keypad, so they must have checked it out. I grab the overdue bookmark, add the title and, in this case, the date checked out, hand it over in their new book and give the standard ‘look in locker and at home’ request.
	This classic excuse is often a bluff in hopes we’ll let it go. Since even super-librarians make mistakes during check-in, I grab a sticky note, write the call number and title, and give it to the student telling them to go find the book on the shelf and bring it to me. If it’s a check-in mistake I scan the book and apologize, making a joke about ‘these darn computers’ or, in my case, ‘this gray hair.’ If they can’t find it, I follow the usual procedure with the overdue bookmark.

Students get a kick out of my ‘gray hair’ reference: I tell them my hair is gray because all the color has leaked out, and now I make a lot of mistakes because my brains are leaking out, too.

BLAMING SOMEONE ELSE FOR AN OVERDUE BOOK

Blame excuses are confrontational, and we definitely can’t let them go; however, we need to realize that blame is really avoidance accompanied by a fear of retribution. If we respond in a calm manner, offering a workable solution that puts the onus where it belongs, we’ll avoid escalating the situation by removing the fear. Here are 4 examples.

This is the universal middle school answer for anything that’s missing. If your school is like mine, a few library books do get shuffled around in the gym or cafeteria, so I simply sigh and sympathize that it happened, as I’m filling in the title on that handy overdue bookmark. Sympathy defuses the fear and when I hand the student the bookmark I tell them to take another look for it…just in case it’s in a locker or at home.
This excuse sounds like such a noble gesture, but it really shifts the burden of responsibility to another student. I ask if the other person is in the library, and if so, have them bring the book up to check it in and then I can check out the book to the newly responsible party. If the other student is not in the library, I gently remind the student that as long as the book is checked out to them, they are responsible for it, so they need to either get the book or the student into the library so we can solve the overdue…and I give them the overdue bookmark as a reminder.
This excuse implies the problem is our fault, but we can maintain our cool. I remind the student that we use our IDs for checkout so a mistake is unlikely, but since it is possible, they can help me by looking around for the book, in their locker or at home, and I hand them the overdue bookmark.
I lament this blame excuse, because I do have ELA teachers who tell students to put library books to return near their classroom door. Often other students grab a book they want to read before the teacher can return it. I have no control over this, so I tell the student to ask the teacher for permission to get the books from the classroom. If no, then I do an overdue bookmark and remind the student to check for the book in class the next day. Eventually someone does return it.

You’ll note that, during a book checkout, students whose accounts show an overdue get an overdue bookmark with the book title written on it. Why do I use this method? Because the student sees this bookmark every time they’re reading their current book and it prompts them to look for the overdue one and return it. I do run overdue notices at periodic intervals, but these bookmarks allow a friendly face-to-face conversation and tend to bring books back much more quickly.

You can download my Overdue Bookmarks Template from my FREE Librarian Resources page.

CONTRITE ABOUT THE OVERDUE…BUT…

Contrition is when a student admits to the overdue book but can’t return it for some reason. These excuses are easy to handle because the student accepts responsibility and just needs an opportunity to retrieve the book or a reminder to bring it back to the library. The worst thing we can do with these excuses is make a big deal about them, so I laugh and take them in stride.

	This is the typical excuse when a student has forgotten it’s a library day. I created a special ‘Library to Locker for Overdue Book’ Pass and I hand one to the student so they can get their book and return it. I have 6 numbered passes, to limit how many students are out and about during the period.
	I know this seems silly since the student just came from the classroom, but it proves my belief that middle schoolers are ‘brain dead’. I tell the student to ask the teacher’s permission to return to the classroom. The teacher knows these students better than I do, and who is trustworthy enough to allow this. If they don’t, the student gets the overdue bookmark and I usually get the book dropped off right after the class period or the next day at the start of the class period.
	This is an easy excuse to handle with some sympathy and the overdue bookmark. If it’s a long-time overdue, I’ll have the student leave a phone message to remind themselves to bring the book back to school. The kids find this funny; I find it works.
	Often a student says this as I pull up their account on the computer and they know they have somehow misplaced the book. When the book doesn’t show up on their account at all, they’re thrilled that it’s been turned back in to the library!
	If the ‘lost’ book still shows as overdue, I ask when they last saw the book as I fill out the overdue bookmark. We need to accept that students misplace things—after all, they’re still learning to become adults. I joke that the book must have been partying with the other books, and hand them their new book. The student laughs and says ‘Yes, Ms. P, it’s a book with legs!‘ We all have a good laugh and the book routinely turns up later on and is returned.

DO WE REALLY NEED A “SOLUTION” FOR OVERDUES?

Each morning during the last week of a grading period, I’d take a bookcart to a hallway where kids were getting into their lockers before first period. Reciting my mantra as I walked down the hall, “Library books, collecting library books!”, kids could easily grab books & put them on the cart. I’d do 2 hallways each morning, so by the end of the week I’d done all 9 hallways, and collected huge numbers of books. This tactic did minimize overdues.

Keep in mind that kids are busy. We adults have a single focus—our subject—and we often fail to appreciate that students must re-calibrate their brains 6 or 8 times a day for different subjects with different teachers in different classrooms. If they forget to return a school library book, we can be forgiving, especially since harsh repercussions don’t work and only alienate student readers. I’ve found 3 benevolent tactics that I believe we can all adopt:

Get rid of overdue book fines. Whatever the original reasoning behind fines, it doesn’t work. Fines keep books out of circulation and discourage students from returning books and checking out new ones to read, the opposite of what we are trying to accomplish.
Always allow a student to check out a book. We can limit a student to a single book if they have overdues, but depriving a student of a book does nothing in the moment to get that overdue back. Rather, it creates ill feeling toward us and the school library, and that’s just plain bad policy.
Quit thinking they’re “our” books, or even “the school’s” books. In a school library, the books belong to the students. They are provided for them and we are only the ‘warehouse manager’. A Facebook comment from School Librarian Jen M. Hash-Staley convinced me:

I always have missing books at the end of the year, I don’t let it bother me much anymore. Tax paying parents funded the purchase, so I like to think that they are enjoying a tax rebate. Crazy talk I know.

Going ballistic over overdues does nothing good. We need to figure out congenial ways to cajole students into returning overdue books. Having a friendly, non-judgmental policy toward overdues will increase both circulation and reading, and go a long way toward building positive attitudes toward the school library.

And remember, a student is always more valuable than a book!

The Different Faces Of School Librarians

Posted on January 21, 2019 by Barbara Paciotti

At first glance, we may seem to have an easy job, but a School Librarian is actually the busiest teacher in the school! Yes, teacher, indeed. School librarians are grade level or subject educators with the same education, training, and certifications as any other teacher, and must have specified years of experience before they can pursue additional education to earn a Masters degree in Library Science, then pass a test to become a K-12 school librarian. Why? Because we believe that as a School Librarian we can impact a greater number of students than teaching in a single classroom. We are often the only staff member who works with every student and every staff member in the school.

For librarians, the day begins with getting the largest classroom in the building ready for students. Depending on library use and custodial support, we may have housekeeping duties, but 2 tasks are a given: turning on (and perhaps logging in to) the library computers and shelving books returned the day before. Once students arrive, elementary, middle school, and high school librarians spend their days very differently.

ELEMENTARY LIBRARIANS Denise, May, and Dan

Denise (Nebraska), May (NYC), and Dan (Maryland) are elementary librarians, Pre-K/Kindergarten through grade 5. They are on a fixed schedule, that is, they are part of the rotation with music, art, and physical education that gives classroom teachers a planning period each day of the week. This is common for elementary librarians, so Denise, May, and Dan have 6 classes throughout the day during which they teach their own library lessons.

Denise has book check out, silent reading, then a fiction or non fiction read-aloud, followed by computer time with an activity that relates to the read-aloud. She also teaches a multi-literacy project with each grade level.

May has a 7-week unit on Appropriate Online Behaviors with all grade levels beginning in October, and then does a variety of other library lessons. She also is assigned to pre-k classrooms during their naptime 2 days a week.

Dan has taught on flexible, semi-fixed, and fixed schedules, lately with a fixed schedule teaching 28 classes a week. Like Denise and May, he has to come up with a ton of lesson plans!

In addition to their regularly scheduled classes, many elementary librarians, like Denise, have a before school reader’s club, or, like Dan, squeezes in an after school book club between school duty 3 days a week.

Dan offers us a great overview of the pros and cons of scheduling dynamics:

	PROS	CONS
Fixed schedule	Equity. Everyone in all grades gets a media lesson on the same schedule with the lessons I want to do.	No time, especially with intermediate grades (3-5), for student-driven inquiry projects. Lack of time for library administrative tasks.
Flexible schedule	Plenty of time for student-driven inquiry lessons. Time for administrative tasks.	Difficulty of coordinating library lessons and visits with teachers. Classroom teachers make or break flex scheduling format: if they are supportive, it works great; if not, for whatever reason, it’s not equitable for their students.
Semi-flex schedule	Pre-K/K-2 get fixed schedule lessons weekly or biweekly, and intermediate grades (3-5) can have student-driven inquiry with teacher collaboration. This is my preferred format because everyone wins; everyone gets something they want and need.	None that I’m aware of!

5-6 LIBRARIAN Melissa

Melissa (Missouri) is the School Librarian in a 5-6 grade building on a semi-fixed/flex schedule. She sees ELA classes regularly, and other subjects are flexibly scheduled as needed. Melissa has set up her ELA library visits so teachers conference with half the students while she does a small instruction lesson with the other half. Then they switch students. That way the conferences and the instruction are both more effective.

Melissa designs library lessons based on what teachers want her to focus on, in addition to her own library research skills lessons, such as citations and source types. She also plans whole school Project Based Learning lessons for half days and a STEAM parent night. Her school is semi-hi tech, with Chromebook carts in the teachers’ rooms, and Melissa has a Makerspace in the library that’s used during RTI time with students who don’t need math and reading help.

HIGH SCHOOL LIBRARIANS Susan and Julie

Susan (Tennessee) is currently a high school librarian, but also has 12 years experience in elementary libraries. Her experience was similar to Denise, May and Dan—fixed schedule, no planning time, no aide, and serving after-school duty—plus she hosted book fairs, wrote grants, promoted reading programs with the public library, and served on committees.

Now, as a high school librarian for over 1100 students and 65 teachers, Susan has a flexible schedule which allows everyone to visit the library at their time of need. She must coordinate library use with testing and events, but she also has a conference room that is used for small group meetings for social workers, recruiters, and professional development.

Susan begins the year with a QR code scavenger hunt orientation, then teaches classes about Internet safety, website evaluation, and creating newsletters. She works throughout the day with individual students who need help with papers and projects. Susan promotes as many literacy-related programs as possible: National Library Card Sign-Up Month, Teen Read Week, Banned Book Week, National Library Month, Read Across America, Read for the Record, Drop Everything and Read.

Susan hosts a teacher library orientation session to get teachers on board with library use, and collaborates with teachers by attending department meetings. She is her school’s onsite technical coordinator, maintaining the library webpage, where she includes scholarship information for students and surveys for students & teachers to submit requests of books to order for the library.

Susan serves on the school improvement plan committee, writes grants, is a book reviewer for the School Library Journal, is involved with her state’s professional library organization, and connects with other librarians through online networks and listservs.

Julie (Tennessee) serves in a 9-12 A-B block schedule high school. She begins her day with a 10-minute homeroom group of students, then has a flexible morning schedule. In the middle of the day, Julie has a 45-minute RTI class, with whom she does a novel study and a unit on digital literacy & reading the news. Then the flex schedule continues until the last period, when Julie covers a 9^th grade ELA class.

After her orientation scavenger hunt at the start of school, Julie schedules anybody that wants to use the library and is open to whatever teachers want to do, like ELA teachers who bring classes in for about 30 minutes to get a book and read. Julie also works with various teachers to develop research projects. A typical research project takes about two weeks, every other day, during that teacher’s regular class schedule.

Julie’s library also offers a makerspace with knitting, friendship bracelets, board games, Little Bits, coloring and drawing, and origami. It serves as a reward, but Julie walks a fine line with teachers about students participating in unscheduled activities.

While having a flexible schedule may seem ideal, Julie also has to work around testing and special events that use the library, such as guest speakers or parent meetings. In her library, flexibility includes the physical facility: the furniture can be rearranged for different uses and the technology is laptop carts, so when students come in to do research, they can get a laptop and a few books and pick a cozy spot to work.

Julie has a book club after school once a month, with snacks based on the book. She also has an ever-growing group of readers at lunchtime who sit in the library and read, where it’s quiet, including some seemingly unlikely participants:

A few weeks ago, it was School Library Media Day and I posted some pictures of library activities that day. A couple of guys had snuck in here and were reading SLAM and ESPN magazines, and I caught them reading and put it on Instagram and Twitter. These two guys are in trouble a lot, but somehow in the photo they looked like fine young scholars, and they liked that. Now they come every day, sit by the window, geek out about basketball, and stay out of trouble. And they have brought friends.

MIDDLE SCHOOL LIBRARIANS Kim and Pamela

Kim (California) and Pamela (West Texas) are middle school librarians, serving grades 6-8. Middle school can be challenging in trying to accommodate both the structure and the freedom requested by the teachers.

Kim’s school is 90% ELL, with about 80% on free or reduced lunch. The library is the newest one in the district and has room for 2 classes, one in the seating area and one at computers, although she has had 3 classes at a time. Kim begins her morning before the first bell, when at least 100 students visit the library for reading, working on assignments, playing board games, using the computers, or just visiting friends. Fortunately, Kim has an assigned duty teacher during this time to help manage the group.

Kim has a fixed schedule for English Language Arts classes, who visit the library every three weeks for book checkout, with one grade level each week, so she has a “6th grade week,” a “7th grade week,” and an “8th grade week.” At the start of school these classes get a few structured lessons, then the rest of the year she offers booktalks, and about half the time the classes remain for SSR (structured silent reading).

The rest of Kim’s scheduling is flexible and revolves around collaborating with teachers whose students will be using the computers: researching, finding and vetting websites, and writing citations. Her school is becoming a Google Classroom school.

Kim has a makerspace for students to use during lunch periods. Students have learned to sew on a button and do a few other stitches, make a green screen video, and lately they’re doing hat-making, thanks to a teacher who donated a huge stack of head-sized paper bags.

Pamela has a completely flex schedule in a huge middle school—1400 students! Pamela’s school library is very popular, especially the makerspace, with students coming in before school, during lunches, and after school.

Students come into the school with strong library skills from structured library lessons in elementary school, so Pamela’s lessons are mainly about using online subscription databases and other Internet lessons.

Pamela’s school is high tech with many computers, both desktop and laptop, and teachers come to her all the time about using technology in their classrooms. She’s the main technology support person in her school, for students and teachers, as well as the webmaster for the school and library websites.

As busy as she is, Pamela makes time to serve as a judge for the Cybils Young Adult Book Awards, and she’s well-known in professional circles for her book review blog & column for the local newspaper, and as a book reviewer for two professional journals. The time spent is well worth it: publishers send Pamela books to review (and keep), so she’s built her school’s print collection into the largest—and the best—young adult collection in the city!

THERE’S MORE TO THE STORY…

Whether fixed schedule or flex schedule—or something in between—school librarians spend plenty of time with students, either teaching library-related lessons or helping them find the perfect book to read. We also spend time collaborating with teachers to integrate library skills and technology into class projects, and have to juggle our schedule to accommodate the planning periods of the collaborating teachers.

But we also have many “invisible” administrative tasks to make sure the library meets the needs of the school. If you see us alone in the library—reading, talking on the phone, on the computer—realize that we aren’t taking a break, we are:

Developing curriculum maps of all subjects to determine what library materials are needed to best support classroom activities, and creating library lessons to make the best use of those library materials for the designated project.
Reading book reviews and meeting with vendors to prepare book lists according to professional guidelines, and creating purchase orders to procure books from the best-value vendors in order to maximize budget constraints.
Processing newly arrived books for student/teacher use, including printing and affixing barcodes, adding protective covers, inputting to the library automation system, and placing on shelves.
Researching and evaluating online materials by phoning or meeting with vendors to determine the highest quality that best match school needs.
Uploading software to computers or mastering online services, and creating lessons to show students (and teachers) their best use in the library and in the classroom.
Repairing damaged print materials, and troubleshooting technology and online resources.
Periodically inventorying library materials—print, digital, and equipment—and possibly classroom materials and textbooks.

These administrative tasks must be planned and completed between all the other activity in the library, and many librarians run their school libraries alone. For example, Dan has an adult aide only for a couple of hours in the morning, and none of the others have an aide; with no assistance in their libraries, Pamela, Julie, and Susan often have to squeeze eating lunch in between students checking out books!

The life of a School Librarian is challenging, demanding, and unrelenting. But ask any School Librarian who has been on-the-job for awhile, and we will tell you it’s not only a rewarding career, but it’s also the best place to be in the school!

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