School Library Visit: Stafford High School
16 October 2023
Wilson, J. (2023). A slice of Stafford High School's library. [Photograph]. CC BY-NC-SA.
For my school library visit, I took a short trip to the local Stafford High School, part of Stafford County Public Schools (SCPS), which brings together the southeastern regions of the population. Compared to the last two visits, this one steps into some unfamiliar territory: while I’ve had some substantial accounts from middle school kids recently and an extremely involved stint at a elementary school two years ago, I’ve gotten barely a glimpse of a high school population, much less witnessed how one might interact with their high school library. My high school library served as a refuge from the tumultuous capriciousness of later grade school years, leaving me more curious about a high school library’s place today.
And in a way, the Indian Loft Library—named after the school’s native-Patawomeck-approved mascot (Stafford High School, n.d.)—sees a higher proportion of students than when I was in high school, eight years ago. Though, not necessarily because they’re there to use the library’s unique services...
Space
While this might be extrapolating too much from a 2-hour slice of a minimum 990-hour school year (Commonwealth of Virginia, n.d.), it still seemed a shame, because Stafford High’s library is quite nice. Likely because it’s also quite modern—the school itself, a 289,000 square foot centerpiece of a fully-fledged recreational campus, was the result of a reconstruction project that began in 2013 and was completed in 2015, expanding the school’s accommodations for 2,000 students (HESS Construction, n.d.). The library has the distinction of being located in the same central partition bridging the school’s two main blocks, directly above the main entrance and office—though since it’s located on the second floor, it posed a minor challenge for me to find as a first time visitor. The hallways are wide and high ceilinged and whitewashed and brightened by lights both natural and artificial, almost reminiscent of a corporate office’s labyrinthine bowels—yet while the library had a similar vibe, the carpeted floor and open air and wide view outside its windows felt like stepping into a lobby or break room.
And that’s not even considering how the library has enough overall space to be as big as an office, or even a standalone library in its own right. The layout is typical for an adult library proper, reference desk centered and widely-spaced bookshelves taking up most of the floor or lining the walls likely the first features a visitor will notice. After that initial impression, a student will search for a place to sit, either at the tables in the periphery of the entrance for more focused work, or somewhere at the congregation of couches and cushioned seats behind the desk.
That is, if a student is visiting during their free time—five separate rooms of different designs surround the main floor, each for a specific purpose. Two are enclosed offices for the librarians or other staff, and one is an open concept space for teachers to use, though cordoned off and hosting overflow for duplicate books and older encyclopedias during my visit. The remaining two rooms likely see the most activity due to all the digital technology held within each, though for their own reasons. One is the Library Lab, a dedicated computer lab occupied by classes the entire duration of my visit; the other is the Cyber Café, a glitzily-lit room featuring computers with specialized software, a green screen, a 3D printer, various craft supplies, and evidence that it occasionally doubled as a standardized testing room—yet was also unused while I was there.
Service
Even though the stacks remained overlooked during my visit, there was plenty of evidence that they see no small amount of usage. The two graphic novel shelves lining the entryway were topped with signage about school events and clubs, including a horticulture club ran by one of the librarians, and a monthly rotating display. As expected, this month’s display was for banned books, which had multiple books directly checked out from its stands, and informational cards on empty stands identifying a book’s given place in the ALA’s censorship ranking. Every single standing shelf was decorated in some way, either with curated or duplicate books placed on top for easy access, or other special displays, such as those for the school’s Battle of the Books tournament or Indigenous People’s Day.
Wilson, J. (2023). Banned books display and Cyber Cafe. [Photograph]. CC BY-NC-SA.
As for the materials in each shelf, Stafford High School’s library is very much tailored to the teen fiction reader. Fiction shelves ring around nearly the entire library; books are labelled not just with genre stickers for romance, science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, and dystopian, but also their place in a series. There’s even a sizable amount of adult fiction in its collection, recently published adult fiction at that—I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the novel Chain-Gang All Stars, a brutal vision of a near-future US prison system more inhumane than our current one, standing on the display with its cover facing the school atop the new books shelf.
And yet, Stafford High’s library only has the space for all its fiction because the rest of its collection has shrunk to accommodate it. Nonfiction materials take up no more than six or seven standing shelves on the far side of the floor, its dwindling DVD and reference book collections are held in overflow or storage, respectively, and magazines have been removed from the collection entirely. The digitization of the library landscape is the selfsame culprit pegged by the school’s librarians as well, as they direct students to digital platforms and online resources that can be kept up to date and databases with scholarly research that are easily accessible (Rubin and Rubin, 2020, pg. 124). However, unlike its public and academic cousins, a high school library’s clientele is more likely to obtain their information through quick-fire web searches and public platforms, regardless if they have the literacy to assess any of it (pg. 125).
People
As I mentioned at the outset, high school libraries seem to have seen a significant rise in usage than when I was in high school. Unlike my hazy memories of dubious veracity, where I would typically be one of three or four students who regularly visited the library during lunchtime, dozens of students were known to shelter themselves from Stafford High’s social cacophony. I emphasize the act of hiding away here, because very few of these students were there to use the library’s specialized services—no more than four students visited to ask a librarian something or check out and/or return books or use one of the library’s four openly accessible computers. The rest just claimed a spot as their own to sit and absorbed themselves in their devices, school-assigned or otherwise1, even hunkering down within the stacks to stay out of sight.
Wilson, J. (2023). Stafford High School's library at lunchtime. [Photograph]. CC BY-NC-SA.
From a value-demonstrating perspective, this might seem more than a little disappointing! This is more or less how it was back in my day, though, not to mention that there are more plausible explanations. Stafford High’s student body is so large that many students have to eat their lunches outside of the cafeteria; and as I was informed by the librarians, most of their devotees or people who need a specific library service usually do so as soon as they arrive at school in the morning.
As for the specifics of people using the library, no ethnic identity seemed to find the library unwelcoming, since people of all skin colors could be seen during my visit. All of the library’s staff, two librarians and one assistant, were White women, though this also seemed similar many schools with Stafford High's demographic ratios: 1,116 students or 54.2% of students in the 2021-2022 student body were White, just a tiny percentage short of Stafford County's leading high school (National Center for Education Statistics, 2023).
Info
If the design of the website for my public library visit's system was plain, then the Indian Loft Library’s website is almost barebones, arguably little more than a template with its colors slightly modified. Assuming you’re even interested in delving through the Stafford High School website to find it—the library’s page isn’t even listed in any dropdown navigation menus; one has to click on the Academics item to be taken to its page, then select Indian Loft Library from the directory.
Limited to just a list of links and their descriptions as it might be, this also leaves it easy to navigate. The main three fixed in the center of the page can take users to the catalog of SCPS’s physical materials, OverDrive’s digital platform for K-12 eBooks and audiobooks (and presumably eMagazines?) called Sora, and to the local public library system’s website. The rest are nestled within a sidebar that must be toggled open on smaller screens, linking to the school’s selection of databases, helpful resources about research techniques and copyright laws, and information about the library itself, including the staff directory.
A photo slideshow of activities held within or facilitated by the library adds a nice human touch to the arrangement, but without the prominent banners of the site’s front page, it feels almost like an afterthought. Perhaps the whole arrangement might be indicative of the high school library as it stands—a wealth of resources that end up ignored or just overlooked by the majority of its beneficiaries, yet still remaining indispensable for the students who do choose to use it.
1 ^As of 2020, each student is assigned a Chromebook prior to reaching high school that they keep through the rest of their school career (Jirak, 2020; Kiser, 2022).
References
Commonwealth of Virginia. (n.d.). 8VAC20-671-420. Standard school year and school day. https://law.lis.virginia.gov/admincode/title8/agency20/chapter671/section420/
HESS Construction. (n.d.). Stafford High School. https://www.hessconstruction.com/projects/stafford-high-school/
Jirak, G. (2020, June 18). Stafford approves purchase of 9,000 Chromebooks, allowing all students to have a device. Potomac Local News. https://www.potomaclocal.com/2020/06/18/stafford-approves-purchase-of-9000-chromebooks-allowing-all-students-to-have-a-device/
Kiser, U. (2022, August 15). Stafford schools block TikTok, encourage safe computer use at school, home. Potomac Local News. https://www.potomaclocal.com/2022/08/15/stafford-schools-block-tiktok-encourage-safe-computer-use-at-school-home/
National Center for Education Statistics. (2023). Stafford Senior High (510366001602). https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/schoolsearch/school_detail.asp?Search=1&County=Stafford%20County&State=51&SchoolPageNum=3&ID=510366001602
Rubin, R. E., & Rubin, R. G. (2020). Foundations of library and information science (5th ed.). American Library Association.
Stafford High: An old school is reborn. (2016, May 5). InsideNoVa.com. Retrieved from https://www.insidenova.com/news/stafford-high-an-old-school-is-reborn/article_44ed78ee-12c1-11e6-bb7e-ff19e09367a2.html
Stafford High School. (n.d.). Welcome to Stafford High School / Our logo and name. https://www.staffordschools.net/domain/6610
Wilson, J. (2023). Banned books display and Cyber Cafe. [Photograph]. CC BY-SA.
Wilson, J. (2023). A slice of Stafford High School's library. [Photograph]. CC BY-SA
Wilson, J. (2023). Stafford High School's library at lunchtime. [Photograph]. CC BY-SA.