Cranston Public Schools is pleased to share that Park View Middle School school library media specialist, Stephanie Mills, is the recipient of a RI Office of Library & Information Services 2024 Library of Rhode Island (LORI) mini-grant. Mills applied for a grant in order to update and refresh the school library. The grant is sponsored by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the Library Services Technology Act (LSTA) and is granted by the State of Rhode Island. The amount of the grant, $7,500 will be spent specifically on new biographies for the school library.

Mills, who was also recently named the URI 2024 Established Alumni of the Year from the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies (GSLIS), realized that the current selection of biographies in the Park View Middle School library categorized the books by the type of person they are, such as a musician or an athlete for example, and were also in poor condition and out of date.

“I felt that we really need to invest in books about civil rights activists for our civics curriculum, and books that were biographies and memoirs for our eighth-grade English Language Arts biography independent reading projects,” said Mills. “I was looking for books that supported our curriculum as well as books for pleasure reading.

She felt that it was important to involve students in the process and therefore, had students suggest what they’d like to read about. More than 400 students replied, which Mills felt showed that the students really did care about having a say in what they were reading.

Mills organized a spreadsheet of responses and categorized them by color, with green being the books that could be ordered as a middle school title, yellow being books they already had, and red being books that were not published or not available as a middle school title about that person.

“We had lots of requests for Taylor Swift, some for singers, rappers, and athletes,” she said. “I really supported the students’ interests and many of their book requests also fell into categories that supported the curriculum and people students were learning about in class.”

One of the projects that the books will support asks the students to research someone that they feel is worthy of being on a postage stamp, and then find the evidence to support how they are influential in their field.

“There is a lot of discussion about the merits that someone needs to have to have a biography written about them, and we talk about the difference between biographies, autobiographies and memoirs or narrative non-fiction,” said Mills. “Their eighth-grade independent reading project is centered around narrative nonfiction and memoirs.”

Mills thought a lot about bringing in various types of formats of biographies and purchased books such as the “Show Me History” titles, comic book retellings such as “Great Lives in Graphics,” which are artistic retellings of a person’s life and of the time period.

“A lot of times these types of books are adult books which have been rewritten for younger readers,” she said.

The books will arrive in two shipments and total about 375 books all together. Mills also ordered labels so that she can continue to add to the different sections of the library shelves and include a new memoirs section for the non-fiction narratives.