A group of students from Gettysburg College has started a plan to remodel the Vida Charter School library in the Gettysburg area.
Students from the Literacy as Agency education class at the college were tasked with coming up with this plan. It has been slowly put into effect throughout the semester.
Getting Books in Hands
Emma Bryan-Wilson is a sophomore at the College and part of the class. She says the plan is to make reading more accessible to young children. The students also want the library to be a more usable space for kids and teachers.
“I think for the kids it’s a great opportunity to have a proper hangout space in their school,” Bryan-Wilson said. “Not to mention they can do this while also being surrounded by good books to read.”
The hope is that it will increase the literacy of these young minds. The course is about learning how to encourage reading in children, and that is exactly what they are trying to accomplish with these renovations.
Starting the Change
“When we first got to the school, the library wasn’t in the best shape,” Bryan-Wilson said. “The books were just in bins organized by genre. There were shelves but some of them were too tall for the children to reach.”
After seeing this, the students came up with an organizational plan and a cataloging system. This was mainly to make the library easier for the kids to be able to access the books.
“We rearranged the shelves and started organizing the books,” Bryan-Wilson said. “We wanted to organize them by genre and alphabetical, so that the kids would know exactly where the book they wanted was.”
All For The Kids
“I really hope the kids like it,” Bryan-Wilson said. “It wasn’t just a project for a lot of us. We really enjoyed coming up with these plans, and we hope that it makes them happy.”
When asked about the timeline of the remodeling, there isn’t a consensus on when it will be done. However, many said that the plan remains to finish the library soon.
I am a junior at Gettysburg College. I was born in London, England, and now live in New York. I've always had a passion for journalism and my grandad was a journalist in New York City -- I want to do the same thing with sports journalism and analytics.