The quiet months of summer are ― for the school library that handles textbooks and technology ― bookended by the craze and commotion of materials check-outs and check-ins. These days are laborious, fast-paced, and typically identifiable by friendly reunions, lengthy lines, sweat, volunteers, a few mixed-up materials, hyper-speed multi-tasking, and aching bodies. It’s busy organized chaos. When school facilities closed in March a non-immediate but looming question was textbook intake in the spring. Would it happen at all? Would we wait until the fall? What would it look like? What precautions would need to be taken?
The end of the school came and we took in the books in a drive-thru format. We got through the first hurdle only to immediately tackle the one next on deck. Like with all school districts, this summer brought so many unknowns, conditional variables, and moving parts. We knew books would need to be issued and that cases of COVID-19 were rising in our county, but those were our only two certainties.
With family convenience and procedural safety as our priorities, I, our library clerk, and our associate principal met several times throughout the summer to draft a plan. Both to reduce unnecessary contact and minimize interactions as well as ensure patron comfort during long waits, we opted for a drive-thru model. We mapped the route as well as the different tasks and their positions. To run smoothly we aimed for a minimum of eight workers at any given time, but made do when we had fewer and increased our productivity when we had more.
To account for the long lines and reduce the impact of traffic throughout our residential neighborhood, the route was designed to loop cars the long way through campus. Entering from the upper fire road access, cars snaked through campus toward the library where it’s positioned alongside the main parking lot near the gated front entrance. Before cars made the turn around the administrative offices and into the main lot, vehicles stopped at a check-in station.
An early version of this plan had this station as a self-check-in utilizing a QR code but we ended up staffing the station to avoid any confusion or technical difficulties. Equipped with a Chromebook and a Google Form, our volunteer entered the names and grade levels of the students passing through. In anticipation of misspellings and hearing errors, we asked families to come through the line with their full names written out. (ID cards would have worked as well, and in some cases that’s what we received, but our thinking was to not have to pass things back and forth, and not to add an added stress to students without last year’s cards.) We found during this process that the families with the foresight to print or type the names in large enough font to be read from the car window helped us the most and we should have asked for that. The form results populated a Google Spreadsheet on a computer outside the library where new entries were monitored like order tickets in a restaurant kitchen.
After checking in, drivers continued around the loop to enter the main lot and reach the library. Remaining in their cars, families drove up to where a volunteer had already pulled the schedule and deleted the corresponding name from the Form results spreadsheet. All the schedules were printed on 2x2 perforated scheduling sheets the night before and pre-highlighted based on technology requests and marked for obligations and any AP books already checked out for summer work. As names came through on the spreadsheet, schedules were pulled and handed by runners ― stationed outside on the curb beneath pop-up sun shades ― to the library staff (and one trained fabulous faculty member) to pull books.
Years prior to this we’ve asked students to check off their courses on a textbook pick-slip, but as there was less room for error this time and no time for student drivers who arrived without it to complete the form while in line, on top of the fact that so much of what was being issued this year was not just course but teacher-dependent, we opted for the schedules. Relying on pre-printed schedules rather than waiting for pick-slips to reach us at our doors opened up time for us to pull books ahead of cars while patrons made their way to the library. The schedules were kept in the order in which they were pulled and the orders filled one at a time. As we do every year, we worked from a row of tables right inside the door stocked with every book, workbook, and packet, sorted by department for easy picking. When supplies ran low on any given stack, a volunteer restocked the table from the textbook stacks on the floor. Once the books and technology were pulled, the pullers walked the stacks and the schedules to one of three scanners working at three socially distanced tables outside. Using the barcodes printed on the schedules, scanners scanned the books out and lined them up in order for delivery. Materials were bagged (with paper and reusable plastic bags collected from the community over the summer) if the schedule had been marked for a car with multiple students. As cars arrived at the front door, runners confirmed their names and pulled the waiting books, delivering them to the trunk, collecting the schedule with the confirmed count of books noted, keeping it as a receipt. In nearly every case the (books were checked out and waiting for cars by the time they reached the library.
We ran the pickup arrivals from 8-3:30 on Monday and Tuesday by alphabetical breakdown by hour and held make-ups on Wednesday from 1-3:00. As crowds passed through, the Google Form developed through our three days of distribution, transitioning from just name and grade level to include YES or NO if their schedule had changed since they were published, YES if there was more than one student picking up materials per car, and YES or NO as to whether or not this was a second time through the line. During the second and third day, an added factor was students coming through a second time, either to make an exchange due to a schedule change, to correct an error in what was issued, or to address a question about what was not issued. (In retrospect, it would have helped to have issued a Not Being Issued list to clear up confusion about classes only using eBooks, etc.) To handle the increase of specialty cases on their second trip through, I went mobile with a Chromebook and checked in with each car as the queue neared the library, in the fashion of a high-volume line at In-N-Out Burger. If it was a family’s first time through I let them continue on. If it was the family’s second time through I took the ID number, looked up their screen and addressed the problem as they moved along in the line. By the time they were first in line they were already set to drive on.
In preparation for this drive-thru short order design, I purchased two Paperang handheld Bluetooth novelty thermal receipt-sized printers. The intention was to use them to either print student textbook requests, schedules, or students’ final textbook accounts. The idea was to save paper and ink, be portable, to have mobile info to work from when filling book orders, and to be able to staple them to the bags to await pickup. Once we learned it would be a possibility that the internet access would be out on the days of distribution we started looking for alternatives, at which point we landed on the printed schedules. In the end, this was the better method. While I am very much looking forward to student use of the thermal printers, I realized that less technology made it easier to train volunteers with differing capabilities.
As was true for school libraries across the state, our days of materials distribution were busy, busy, busy. Day one, those of us on our feet, didn’t sit once from 7:45 am - 5:30 pm. We didn’t at all feel a decrease in traffic of the half hour break scheduled in the middle of the day. At some points, the wait time on Monday was two hours, but by Tuesday, we had it down to about twenty minutes. The difference was that on day two we had more hands, including a third scanner and a third book puller. Given the long waits, we were prepared for some tempers or negative feedback but received none. Families were patient and appreciative. One family even brought a trunkful of cold waters, sports drinks, and snacks for us as they came through. Over and over we heard thank yous and how well organized the system was. One piece of written feedback read, “Btw my older daughter took my younger to get her books and told me it was so well organized. She said even though the line was crazy long and she was there a long time everything about it was super organized! She stressed it over and over. So, good job to you guys!”
With distribution largely behind us and only twenty-two students still to go, my fabulous clerk, Meggan, and I have deemed this a success. The schedules removed student error in self-reporting textbook needs. The drive-thru eliminated students walking away without having their books scanned (which happens every year). Getting the two of us out from behind scanners where we’ve traditionally been, diminished the errors in distribution. And having the schedules pre-marked for obligations and more still allowed for student follow-ups when necessary. There’s a lot from this new system we’re thinking of keeping in place. When we can lose the masks and add more volunteers, this might be what we go with in future years.
I would be remiss in recounting this process without giving credit to our associate principal who empowered Meggan and I to design a process that would work for us, and the classified staff and our amazing happy-go-lucky SRO who did most of the scanning, name pulling, restocking, and running. A HUGE additional thank you is owed to the handful of certificated staff who amidst the craze of preparing for distance teaching and learning a new LMS, sacrificed valuable work hours to work with us. In all respects, a school library is a place for community; and every year during textbook season when I start to run the calculations and worry we’ll be understaffed, my community invariably answers the call. Every time it’s humbling and speaks to the strength of the connections at our school.
From here, with textbooks in the rearview mirror, we move ahead with remote library services and drive-thru pickups of library books.
Ashley BrockmanTeacher Librarian
Palos Verdes High School
brockmana@pvpusd.net
@PVHS_Library
