Librarian profiles
Meet Valerie Byrd-Fort
You can’t blame Valerie Byrd-Fort for liking her job. Work, she says, is often about “play.”
“I get to have a lot of fun,” says Byrd-Fort, a library media specialist at Dutch Fork Elementary School near Columbia, South Carolina. “I get to play with various types of technology. I get to play on the Internet and search for kid-friendly Web sites that will teach my students information literacy skills, introduce them to authors and illustrators, and sites that may even teach them how to do something (like build a box car or fly a kite). "
“I love my job because I get to interact with different people all the time—parents, children, teachers, volunteers. ... There is always someone new to talk to. I love the variety of my job. No day is like the one before it. The best part about my job is that I get to show kids that reading is fun. I get to introduce them to new books and hear about all the adventures they have in the books they read.”
The students are often quicker studies than the teachers and ultimately become Byrd-Fort's assistants. “They go back and help the teachers,” she says. “We do workshops for teachers and the same stuff for the kids. The kids will help troubleshoot. We all try to help each other.”
During the course of a typical week, she says, Byrd-Fort will interact with nearly all of the school's 600 students. “I'll either see them at checkout, or read them a story, or teach them an information literacy lesson. I also work with every single teacher, and that's a ton of variety with K-5.”
Byrd-Fort, her school’s teacher of the year in 2005-2006, embraces technology as a teaching tool. She has her own blog and audio podcasts that provide additional information about books and events at the school and in the library.
“I’ve heard a lot of other librarians listen to it. I'm not sure it’s really gotten out to the parents yet; it’s on iTunes and the school Web site. We're also going to do some radio theater with the teachers and students. They act out what's going on in the classroom, and part of that is acting out a book. They can do that through the podcast.”
Overall, she says, the job accentuates the positives of the school environment. “Most of the interaction I have with parents is very positive." I get to see the best of the parents and the kids. The classroom teachers have a lot of fun, but I think librarians can do more with it. There’s just more stuff to do.”
