It’s been a hectic, wonderful, crazy beginning to yet another school year. Here are some of the finer points (think I’d advertise the bad ones?:) that keep me going when I feel like I’ll never catch up:

• We lost one clerk because of budget cuts, but we still have an awesome team of three to run our high school media center. We are fortunate.

• We have done SO many 9th grade orientations. I could do it in my sleep. But we’ve gotten good at it. And even though our feeder school’s library looks fancy-shmancy compared to ours, we can usually turn students around by the end of orientation. “This library looks so small” and “Where the second floor?” often turn into “I think I’m going to like this place,” and “Oooh…I’ve been wanting to read this book” and “We can really check out five books at a time?”

• I don’t know how many checkouts we’ve done (currently at home sick with one sick child too) but it’s about a zillion. Ok, that might be exaggerating…a half zillion. Trust me, it’s a big number.

• We helped with revamping a couple of our summer reading lists. I had a senior tech student come in and want to see the list again. I assumed he hadn’t finished his summer reading book. “Oh no; I just liked it and wanted another.” My inner dork did a happy dance. (For the record, no actual dancing happened. I have learned that scares high school students away.)

• We assisted with three research projects by the 8th day of school. It’s going to be a busy year.

We’ve dealt with little air conditioning, no air conditioning, lots of administrative requests, two of our small staff have sent their “babies” off to college, I sent my oldest to Pre-K, I’ve been sick, my youngest is sick, and it’s day 11. Can’t wait to see what the rest of the year brings! I hope all of you out there are getting some good with the crazy that is inevitably the start of the school year. You may be feeling overwhelmed and under-appreciated, but know that what you do is incredibly important, even if you don’t hear it every day. Good luck and happy 2010-11!

Holly Frilot, Library Media Specialist

Collins Hill High School

www.chhsmediacenter.com