Jennifer Abel

NCSLMA President

2023-2024

President’s Corner May 2023

I hope everyone had an amazing School Library Month!! You all are amazing and work tirelessly every day to ensure that students and staff have access to information and develop a love of reading!! 

Shout out:

Congratulations to Dr. April Dawkins for being Elected as an AASL Director At Large. 

Conference News:

Conference Webpage

Make sure you are checking social media for all the amazing door prizes that have been donated for our upcoming conference! 

The call to present is now closed, thank you to everyone who submitted a proposal! This year’s conference is looking amazing! 

The PR team for Conference 2023 is looking for stories of the magic happening in your library. We want to share on our social media outlets the great things NC School Librarians are doing in our libraries. But we need your help for that. Please consider submitting a photo or video that showcases your and/or your library's magic. It can be small magic, big magic, or anything in between.  

We will be taking these submissions until September 30, 2023. Our goal is to publish every submission. With almost 2000 members, we really hope to be overwhelmed with stories. :-)    https://forms.gle/NBADmwPYwUZyKaZw8

Open Volunteer Positions: 

Have you wanted to volunteer with NCSLMA, but didn’t know where to start? We’re making it easy because we would love to have your talents supporting our organization! Check out the new Open Volunteer Positions on our website for information about current open positions. This list does change as positions become available, so make sure to check it often. If you see something that sounds like it would be a great fit, please consider volunteering. Not only will it help NCSLMA, you will also be able to show leadership at the state level on the DPI School Librarian Evaluation Tool.

Current Openings:
Treasurer
Website Director
Awards Grants and Scholarships Director
National Board Coordinator
NCSLMA Store Coordinator
Advocacy Committee
Legislative Committee
Intellectual Freedom Committee

Upcoming events: 

The Page Turners Book club will meet May 20th to discuss Barbara Kingsolver’s book “Demon Copperhead”

May AM Brew Crew -  May 6th 9:00 am - 11:00 am
May PM Brew Crew - May 26th 8:00 pm - 10:00 pm 

I haven’t been able to keep up with the Conference blog for the past couple of months, but I’ll be starting it up again this week. There is a LOT to update everyone on and I can’t wait to share it all. The blog will go into detail, but some of the most exciting things include:

• Call To Present was a success! We had 160 session submissions. Unfortunately, we only have just under 90 available session slots, so we have to make some hard decisions. I am grateful for the Board of Directors for helping to score the submissions. The process was a blind evaluation - scorers only saw the session title and description, along with the target audience. This way, proposals were graded purely on the merit of the session itself. 

• Featured Speakers secured!! We are excited to announce that Amy Hermon, podcaster extraordinaire or School Librarians United, will be our opening Featured Speaker! She will be in and around the conference making a podcast all about NCSLMA. Our closing Featured Speaker will be Donna Washington, storyteller extraordinaire! Donna has been in many of our schools and with her children’s books and upcoming professional book on storytelling, she is a fantastic addition to our conference and I cannot wait to hear her! She will also be presenting a workshop on Saturday on storytelling for the school librarian. AND she’ll be on one of our storyteller panels. 

• Hotel rooms - I know last year, we sold out like immediately. We tried to add more rooms to our Embassy block and cannot as they said they are sold out that weekend already. We were able to add a few more rooms to our Marriott block, though. Because of some back end things, we will have to release the room discount codes a little later in May. 

• Early Bird Registration is NOW open. It will be open through June 30. Please note that if you have not paid for registration before June 30, your registration will be canceled and you will have to re-register and pay at the regular rate or the late rate if it’s after August 31. 

I say this every month, but I mean it every time I say it. I could not put this conference together without the amazing people helping out. I am humbled by their commitment and grateful for their help!

Have a wonderful May!

Kristy

Advancement
Director: Faith Huff

Advocacy
Director: Lucy Wilcox

Awards, Grants, Scholarships
Director: Robin Rhodes

AASL Delegates

Laura Aldridge & Sarah Justice

Book Programs
Director: Stacy Hersey

Membership
Director: Vacant

Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

Michelle Burton & Ness Shortley

Regional Directors:
Lead: Lori Munroe

Social Media
Director: Alicia Luke

Website
Director: Vacant

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