WIRC 2018

Our teams performed so well this year, and I am so proud of how each and every student represented Norwin. As always, we had a blast at what has become my favorite school day of the year. One of our WIRC team members wrote a wonderful article about the competition for the school paper, so everything that follows is her article:

Ribbons for reading

By Madison Stanley

     On March 5, Norwin’s Westmoreland Interscholastic Reading Competition (WIRC) club attended their yearly competition at Seton Hill University.  

     WIRC students spend months reading books from a list of 30 that is released at the end of the previous year.  At this competition, teams are paired up with different teams for 4 rounds. These rounds consist of 30 questions total on any of the various books from the list. If a team misses a question the question goes to the opposing team and if that team answers correctly they are granted a quarter point. This makes the total amount of points available 18.75 per round.

     The Norwin WIRC club met during lunches with more frequent meetings as the competition grew closer. During these meetings the group would discuss books from the list with the intention of giving the entire club a better understanding of all the books on the list. Every student was required to read four books and write question sets on each, which is the only requirement of joining the club.

     Norwin had three teams attend the competition this year. The teams based their names off of books from the WIRC list. The freshman team was Extremely Quiet and Incredibly Nerdy, which is a pun on the book Extremely Quiet and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. The sophomore team was Code Name Norwin, based off of Code Name Verity by Elizabeth E. Wein.  The senior team, including one junior, was Booking for Alaska, based off of John Green’s Looking for Alaska.

     Extremely Quiet and Incredibly Close placed third overall and awarded yellow ribbons, the highest finish for any Norwin team ever in WIRC competitions.  Booking for Alaska placed fifth overall, which was awarded with pink ribbons.

     “This year’s questions must have been a lot harder than last year’s,” said senior Sebastian Pratt, due to the fact Booking for Alaska had a lower score than the Norwin team which placed sixth in the previous year. 

     Overall, Norwin’s WIRC teams have been improving and expanding over the years and will hopefully continue to do so.

     “We did better than I thought we did,” said senior and Booking for Alaska team captain, Meghan Williamson.

    The Norwin WIRC team hopes to continue improvement next year and awaits the next list of books to dive into.

Perseverance in the Library

At the beginning of November, I received the call that I have feared every year since I started my school library career: as of that moment, library funding was completely cut. To be fair, all "non-emergency" funding was cut in the entire district. According to the new algorithm for determining federal funding, my district would be receiving significantly less than expected. This "moratorium on spending" of course trickled down to each professional in each building. In some ways, I was fortunate that I got the call in November instead of July because I had already purchased a few staples like our online databases and our reading team books. But I was expecting to spend approximately 70% of the library budget sometime before February, which is our usual yearly spending cutoff date. I took a little bit of time beating myself up for not focusing more on purchasing at the beginning of the school year, but there was no point in brooding over something that I had no control over. Instead, I listed my major goals for the year to determine exactly what I needed in order to continue having a successful year for the library. The first goal was to purchase a list of 50 books that were primarily student recommendations. Contrary to popular opinion, fiction reading in my school library has increased this year, and I am absolutely determined to continue this trend. Secondly, a student last year took the initiative to start a student-run book club during lunches after the reading competition concluded in the Spring. They had selected two books, and we would need at least 25 copies of each. Finally, we need funds to attend our annual field trip to the county reading competition. I needed a plan.

First, I recalled our local Barnes and Noble store contacting me in the past about facilitating an in-store book fair. I contacted them again, and set up a meeting with the manager to discuss all of the details and to set up the date. We chose a date approximately two weeks before Christmas, which proved to be an effective time to have the fair. We advertised in school, on social media, and to parents and community members. We also brought copies of our donation code with us in case people in the store asked us who we were (we were all wearing our school colors or our reading team t-shirts). With a combination of luck and hard work, we earned over $1,600 in books for our library. I am incredibly thankful to Barnes and Noble for helping us to fill our library with new books, and I feel so lucky to work with such wonderful and motivated students. We had students who offered to stay at Barnes and Noble all day to give our donation code to parents and community members who asked for it, although we had such a great volunteer response that we only needed students to stay for 1-2 hour shifts. It was such a great, uplifting day!

Secondly, to ensure that we had enough funds to purchase books for our student-run book club and to possibly go on a field trip, I wrote several grants. For one grant, I was interviewed at the YALSA Symposium in Pittsburgh. My grant proposal was unfortunately not accepted, although the process was a positive one. For this grant, we were required to be able to speak on how individual conference sessions inspired our grant idea and how we might use what we learned in order to improve our home library. Although my grant idea was not selected, I am still hoping to be able to gain funds at some point to make my idea a reality.

Finally, Wal-Mart came through and granted us $750 to run our student book club this year! I am extremely thankful to our local Wal-Mart store for selecting our proposal. I recommend that other school libraries in need consider looking into grants offered by large and small organizations alike. Many companies are happy to support public education, and this librarian is incredibly thankful to them.

Fierce Reads Field Trip

On October 4, 2016, the Knight Readers had the incredible opportunity to take a field trip to the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. We took a fantastic tour of Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, had dinner "dahn-tahn," and ended the evening with a YA author lecture at the Carnegie Lecture Hall attached to the museums. Multiple times I overheard students exclaim, "we need to do this every month!" In fact, I think the students would have been ecstatic just to tour the library, even if we didn't get a chance to geek out hearing from nationally known best-selling authors. Here's a little virtual scrapbook of our trip:

Walking toward the CLP - the Cathedral of Learning looming in the distance

The Knight Readers

CLP - all the knowledge "Free to the People"

Checking out some rare books - one was even from the mid-1400s

Excited for the authors to come on stage!

Caleb Roehrig, Emma Mills, Anna Banks, and Marissa Meyer 

The YA authors who participated in the Fierce Reads Tour were incredibly funny, thoughtful, and inspiring. Most of our students had never met an author before, let alone authors that they have read and admire. The authors graciously autographed tickets and books for us, answered all of our questions, and they even gave us a shout-out on Twitter! About a month later, I also Tweeted Caleb Roehrig to ask about #OwnVoices book suggestions for our Diversity Club, and I am so grateful that he provided so many wonderful authors and book titles to explore further. Finally, I am beyond thankful to RAD Works Here, a local organization that provides funding so that children and families can enjoy the arts for free. Without them, we could not have brought so many students to experience this incredible opportunity. Thank you!