Dream of the past

It is interesting how dreams sneak up on you--you haven't thought of something in years and bingo! there it is in your dreams.

I dreamed last night of the days when I was supervising elementary school libraries in Abilene. In this dream, it seemed that I had been gone for a long time and had been called back to supervise again. I spent the whole night trying to think of the names of each librarian in the schools I supervised. What a night! They were the salad days in my life when I helped build a superior program, in which every school had a full-time librarian. We were the envy of many larger schools in Texas which had only library aides in the elementary schools supervised by a greatly overworked high school librarian. Thanks to a great superintendent who knew the value of libraries and trained people to run them, we did wonderful things. But later came a superintendent who knew not libraries and the whole structure went downhill--Thankfully I was retired.

If any of my readers are superintendents or school board members, you can do no better favor for your schools than to put trained librarians in every school, and spend money for books. We proved that with higher test scores, more readers, and better resources for teachers.