Have you seen a decline in reading among secondary school students? Are you wondering how to increase opportunities for choice reading and library utilization at your high school? Brookfield Central High School Principal, Brett Grueztmacher, and High School Librarian, Colleen Fenno Ladwig, will discuss our experience over the past three years of hosting quarterly “check out weeks,” which bring students into the library to checkout choice books for regularly scheduled, cross-discipline, independent reading. We will also consider other efforts we’ve made to ignite and inspire reading, including building a school-wide reading culture, offering passive programming, and factoring in larger trends in reading that make emphasizing choice reading at the secondary level more important now than ever. Finally, we will welcome suggestions from other secondary school librarians who have successful strategies for the high school library: how are you igniting and inspiring reading in your schools?
