Pikesville High School 410-887-1219
7621 Labyrinth Road, Baltimore, Maryland 21208
Fax: 410-415-7274
To Whom It May Concern: Have you ever heard of a “pro-mance?” To me, this term expresses a mutual admiration among professionals. The purpose of this letter is to convey why I believe that Joquetta Johnson deserves to be recognized as the Librarian of the Year, and why I admire what she is doing for her students and for the profession. First, a little history. In fact, that sums up all of the experiences I’d had with librarians. My grandmother was a librarian who taught me many things about ways to learn about history. When I started working as a school counselor, the librarian who worked at my first school was our resident historian for the school, and she cherished that role. Then, when I transferred to Pikesville High, I met my first librarian who was more concerned with using library resources as a means to create one’s future than she was to explore the past. Ms. Johnson’s immediate objective and vision for her library was to make a place for students to be comfortable among the resources, and the library/media center suddenly felt more like a book shop with its comfortable and trendy seats than a stodgy home for unused relics. Rather than introducing herself as the librarian, the brand that Ms. Johnson created for herself was as a “Digital Diva.” And trust me, she is. Throughout my career, colleagues looked askance at the efforts that I took to bring my school counseling programming into the 21st century, as though engaging students should be limited to my office. Seeing Ms. Johnson in action, she became my role model for using Web 2.0 tools to help students interact with the global learning network that is available to them. She showed me how we can use YouTube to provide resources, and found two solutions (http://tinyurl.com/GetAPFit) to a complicated problem that we had – how can we share video clips of teachers and students discussing the realistic expectations of Advanced Placement coursework, in such a way as to encourage students to pursue rigor without giving them biased opinions? By posting the videos online, of course, and using a shortened URL that is easy to add to documents that allow us limited white space for publication! When it became clear that one of our schoolwide objectives was going to be to increase the mean SAT scores for all of our students while encouraging all students to take advantage of this college readiness opportunity, Ms. Johnson amazed us with the resources that she catalogued using LiveBinders. In fact, Ms. Johnson’s use of LiveBinders was so influential that our AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) coordinator used the resource to maintain our site team’s recertification documents, and was recognized throughout the school system for the innovation. It also inspired me to use LiveBinders as a means of putting my state school counselor association conference’s program online for the first time. Without exception, every one of our faculty meetings begins with a “Tech in 10” session hosted with Ms. Johnson, when she takes the stylus from her Promethean board and dazzles the entire Focused on Quality
Committed to Excellence