Spanish heritage students at Oak Lawn Community High School will soon get more popular books in their home language, after the Media Center secured a grant for that purpose.
The $1,500 Feed Your Need Grant from the Association of Illinois School Library Educators/Library Book Selection Service Endowment Fund means there will be more books and e-books like “El Arroyo de lo Llorena” by Sandra Cisneros for those students to read.
“Any time students can see themselves in what they read, it can make them feel connected and special,” said Jennifer Sidlow, a media specialist at the school who helped prepare the grant proposal.
Heritage students typically come from homes where parents and relatives may speak their native language. Even if the teens speak that language at home, they may miss out on the literacy skills they are gaining with their English schooling.
“They often enjoy seeing their home culture and language represented in our school library,” said Spanish teacher Nate Joiner, who knows these students well. “They also sometimes like seeing words in print that they’ve previously only heard aloud their whole lives.”
Media specialists Sidlow and Eileen Wholley had already seen the need for the books and collaborated with Joiner on getting more.
“He said he wanted to start doing some independent reading to supplement their classroom and interests with Spanish,” said Wholley. “The activity was really successful in the classroom and he said, ‘Can we get more?’”
That meant getting more of a variety of Spanish translations of popular English books.
The grant was awarded to 26 school libraries in Illinois, but it went to only six high schools, with OLCHS as the only recipient in the Southland.
In their grant proposal, the two media specialists cited the school’s large number of ELL and Spanish heritage students, a number they said continues to increase.
Wholley pointed out the new books will be important because they reflect the growing diversity in the school.
“Our media center is the hub of the school,” said Wholley. “We want to reflect who our community is.
“In the morning before school, there are around 150 students who are in here and of those, there are Spanish speaking, Arabic speaking and Polish,” she said. “It’s just part of meeting the needs of our community.”
The media center, which includes a tech help bar, full computer lab, collaboration tables and art gallery, was also granted the Exemplary School Library Award, 2022-2025 from the Association of Illinois School Library Educators.
Janice Neumann is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.
