Panal Participants: Beth Evans, Brooklyn College, Coordinator: Rebecca C. Albrecht, Mortola Library, Pace University; Yvonne Bennet, Medgar Evers College ; Debbie Cestone, Pehlham High School; Diane DeVeaux, Hunter College High School librarian; Louise Fluk, LaGuardia Community College ; Allan Mirwis, Kingsborough Community College ; Peggy Perrin, New York Law School and Hunter High School parent; MaryAnn Ryer, Raritan Valley Community College.

Beth Evans, Electronic Services Specialist/Reference Librarian, Brooklyn College:

Beth called the session to order at 11:10 a.m., and discussed the background of CUNY initiatives over the past fifteen years on pre-college outreach. Among these initiatives was an eleven-lesson online information literacy course for high school seniors that Beth developed as a result of a TIIAP grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce and CUNY participation in a J.P. Morgan grant originating from Pace University.

The purpose of the day’s discussion was to look at what we are doing now with pre-college outreach, and to investigate the direction in which colleges and high schools may move in the future. Of concern is the Schmidt Report which clearly states that CUNY has a responsibility to New York City’s high schools. Recent discussions with various CUNY people who have worked with outreach programs with the City’s schools indicate that the relationship between and the level of cooperation among the City’s high school libraries and CUNY libraries is very uneven. Some CUNY schools have high schools physically located on the campus; others have a relationship with a neighboring high school. Some work with pre-high school students.

Another concern is the issue of life-long learning--a continuum that begins long before college and continues long after college.

Survey of CUNY Chief Librarians: Conducted by Beth Evans, the survey asked the seventeen chief librarians what services they provided for on-campus and off-campus high school students; fourteen responded to the survey.

Louise Fluk, Coordinator of Instruction, LaGuardia Community CollegeLaGuardia Community College:

La Guardia is a striking example of a college with a campus high school. There are actually three high schools on the campus, LaGuardia Middle High School with 500 students, International High School, located next door to the library, with 450 students, and Robert F. Wagner Institute with 325 students of different ethnic backgrounds in grades 7-12. Wagner has plans to build its own library, but right now the LaGuardia Community College Library is the library for all three schools. The Board of Education has given the Library funds for the collection; pre-college students can borrow library materials and receive bibliographic instruction at the request of the classroom instructor. Instruction is targeted to a specific assignment and students usually come in before the library opens to use the electronic classroom.

Initially, Louise and her staff did specialized programs for the high school students. Now, that is not the case and the high school students tend to blend in with the community college population. BI classes are given, but not as many as there should be. These classes are conducted by an adjunct professor who is a retired high school librarian. LaGuardia has not been able to fill a line for an Externsion Services librarian who would work with high school students.

College Now: This is a grant program initiated in part by Teachers College in which high school students can get up to 12 credits in college courses; these courses are taught by adjuncts who are also high school teachers. La Guardia gets these students for BI, but it is quite complicated to schedule since these students need parental permission to come to LaG by bus, as well as LaG IDs. The idea behind the program is to improve student success ratio in college, and to improve retention.

College Connection: This is another program in which middle level students, 12-13 years old, are coming to CUNY campuses to take college courses.

Leon M. Goldstein High School at Kingsborough Community College has a science program that targets students one third below the norm, one third average and one third above average. It opened with 200 high school students and is now up to 750. Right now, the students are on campus in temporary buildings. A high school is being built but there are security and funding issues. Goldstein does not have a library.

KCC Library asked the high school faculty to sit down and talk to get an idea of how they could work together. To date there’s been no response. But Kingsborough sees its biggest problem with information literacy to be with the high school faculty, not the students, because the faculty will not admit that they don’t know how to use the library’s resources. The Kingsborough Library hired two adjuncts for the program who are primarily working the reference desk. Next time, KCC will hire a retired high school librarian who knows how to communicate with high school faculty.

Kingsborough CC Library focuses on collaboration and partnership between the City’s high schools and CUNY as a participant in College Now. Moreover, Kingsborough is proactive in working with public, proprietary and private high schools and with senior citizens. It started this program 20 years ago, offers baby sitting facilities and day care, services for high schools, elementary schools and students over 55, and it is viewed as the answer for the high school and college remediation problem. Before the 1990s it was a small program, maybe 13,000. Now it’s around 44,000 with a $10-million budget.

Information literacy will become an important piece of this program. Kingsborough would like to see the panel create a model as a follow-up to this session, and get the Chief Librarians and everyone involved to adopt a tutorial that addresses:

(1) What can students be expected to do and how can librarians determine that they’ve done it?

(2) What are librarians really talking about when they talk about information literacy? It’s gone way beyond using Reader’s Guide.

Kingsborough also developed a program working with the Westinghouse students in conjunction with the Board of Education that worked very well, and is a strong proponent of a CUNY-Board of Education partnership.

Yvonne Bennet, Associate Librarian, Bibliographic Instruction, Medgar Evers College :

Six to ten years ago an alternative high school was placed in an old building on campus, Middle College High School, having no library and using ME facilities. Students are permitted to borrow from ME library. Meanwhile, a new high school is being built.

Partnerships: ME faculty and administration promote community outreach. The Library has secured a number of grants that have allowed it to sponsor lectures, presentations, programs, film discussions and other events in an effort to bring high school students to campus and recruit them to enroll in ME. ME Library collaborates with several local high schools: Prospect Heights, Boys & Girls, Paul Robeson, Wingate and Erasmus. In addition, the Library worked out a literature-based program at Thomas Jefferson High School on Black women writers, and Yvonne is working on methods of collaboration with the Thomas Jeferson school librarian.

Yvonne says it is important to have continuing dialogues with the high school librarians and the Board of Education’s library coordinator.

College Preparatory Initiative (CPI): Begun 10 years ago, it has opened the dialog between the library and COLLEGE NOW to work with high school students; first semester, entailed working with four high school students in 11th and 12th grades to improve writing skills; next term will concentrate on social and behavioral sciences.

"In 1991, then CUNY Chancellor Ann Reynolds initiated her College Preparatory Initiative (CPI), in which equal numbers of high school teachers and college professors came together in discipline-based committees charged with defining basic subject competencies for college entry. Libraries had not been thought of in the initial proposal, but in March 1992 LACUNY's (Library Association of the City University of New York) bibliographic instruction committee proposed the formation of a Library Instruction discipline committee, and the chancellor agreed." ¹

¹ from Daniel Rubey, "Students Teaching Students, Faculty Teaching Faculty," presentation at a meeting of the New York State Academic Library Directors NYLA/ASLS/NYTRO, Academic Libraries 2000, September 30-October 1, 1999, Albany, New York.

City University of New York - Hunter College High School

Diane DeVeaux, librarian, Hunter College High School:

Hunter College High School is part of the Hunter College campus schools and covers 7-12^th grades, with students from all five boroughs. A separate Hunter College Elementary school serves the pre-K-6^th grade student population, and is open to Manhattan students only. For the latter, students are tested at the Pre-K level and commit to remaining in the school through the sixth grade. Hunter High School students are required to take an entrance exam; 240 students are admitted each year, and the seventh graders must be two years ahead in both math and reading.

Library Access: High school students (grades 9-12) have access to the College library and 11^th and 12^th grade students can borrow books if they bring a letter from the high school librarian. Parents want 7^th and 8^th grade students to also have access to not only Hunter College library but to all CUNY libraries. High School students come to the HCHS library for an introduction to resources for term papers in social studies and in science; they receive instruction in library resources and materials; they have access to the library whenever it’s open no passes are required. Library computers do not have Internet access, but the students can use the high school computer labs where they do have access.

Hunter High School parents want Internet access in the library for the students and this will probably occur, although access will be limited to research (no email/chat rooms). The computers do have CUNY+ and students can access the home page of Hunter College Library to access licensed resources.

Funding comes from the state, alumni and parents for the high school library; alumni are supporting the automation of the high school library.

A major goal of the Hunter College High School PTA has been to take advantage of the High School's position as the laboratory school for Hunter College's Dept. of Education and to draw on resources at the College, in particular its library.

The Hunter College High School's Library Task Force was set up in the fall of 1999, comprising parents, the Hunter HS Librarian, the acting principal and an alumna. The charge of the Task Force was to assess library needs-both physical and material-and recommend ways to meet them. They were faced with a small and limited space, a crowded and an uneven collection, the need for greater access to online resources, and a limited school budget.

During the 1999-2000 school year, the Task Force met, visited other high school libraries, conducted a survey of the High School faculty, and developed short- and long-term recommendations. In early May 2000, the chair reported the Task Force's findings to the PTA executive board. The board approved the report and promptly allocated PTA funds to begin to strengthen weak parts of the collection and to address some of the library's smaller physical problems. The Task Force was designated a standing committee and will continue to work during the upcoming school year.

One of the most important recommendations of the Task Force was to increase and improve access to the Hunter College library. Although under the governance of the Board of Higher Education, Hunter High is one of New York City's selective public high schools. Students do college-level work early on in many of their classes. The High School has neither the space nor the budget to duplicate existing resources. An active link with the College would be invaluable to them.

There was some general discussion about the problem with high school students having non-instructional use of the college libraries. This would affect (1) Policy: Who is responsible? Parents are responsible for students but libraries are responsible for rules and regulations; (2) Rights of use concern.

Patricia Sarles, Canarsie High School librarian and adjunct librarian, Brooklyn College Library:

Patricia was not able to attend the discussion as previously arranged. Patricia was prepared to talk about her $.5 million Bertelsmann Foundation Grant. Patricia used the grant money to buy a CD-ROM server, computers and a printer as well as full-text electronic resources. Patricia felt that giving the college-bound students of Canarsie high school access to indexes to journals was not enough. The students wanted to get the journal articles and not just citations. If they could not get the material at Canarsie high school, they were not likely to be able to get it at all. Rather than partnering with a college library that was more likely to have the journals cited in an electronic index, Patricia used the grant money to buy full-text electronic resources on CD-ROM. The students were well served, but an accident early in the spring 2000 semester rendered the CD-ROM server useless. Because the server was bought with grant money and not insured by the Board of Education, Patricia has found getting the equipment repaired to be a long and complicated process.

Patricia's work in securing the grant is an example of a high school librarian seeking out exceptional resources for the high school library, rather than partnering with an academic library in the community to get access to additional resources. High School students in New York City are budgeted $6.00 each by New York State for library resources. Securing superior resources requires intiative on the part of the high school librarian to get additional resources or an alliance with another institution. An alliance with another institution might have provided Canarsie High School with additional support when it was needed. The New York City School Library System Network (SLS) makes a number of resources available to all high schools and other resources available to selected high schools. The director of SLS was invited to attend the LACUNY discussion but could not.

A Private University and Secondary Education in New York City

In addition to highlighting the current pre-college outreach programs at Pace University, Rebecca gave the history of the 1994-1998, $200,000 Pace University High School/College Cooperative Library Project funded by J.P. Morgan and Co., Inc. The project partnered Pace, four private universities, the City University of New York, public high schools and private academies in New York City. It was designed to "provid[e] library access to significant research materials and training in technological knowledge retrieval" (Patricia Ewers, letter to Managing Director of J.P. Morgan and Co., Inc., 1994).

New York City high schools, in particular, the smaller, alternative schools, were seen as lacking adequate and advanced resources as well as necessary technology. The goals of the project were to

• enhance the research skills of students
• ease the transition of students from one educational unit to another
• link the educational process into a lifelong learning continuum
• provide access to information not otherwise accessible
• develop the technological skills of high school librarians

Participating students included exceptionally talented juniors and seniors. The participating colleges hoped that the partnership would help with student recruitment.

Debbie Cestone, Chairperson, Library / Media Department, Pelham Memorial High School:

Debbie reported that the high school library has 40 networked computers for 1,100 students. The students have access to the WALDO union catalog for serials and books. Debbie supports their research with Dialog searches. The local college libraries Iona, College of New Rochelle, and Sarah Lawrence provide support for students (ninth through twelfth grades) in advanced placement and science resarch courses. Students are permitted to borrow materials through ILL. Debbie will arrange in advance for the students to have access to the college libraries. She will accompany them on their trips.

Debbie recommends that if college librarians want to be informed about what is happening in high schools and with high school libraries, they should read School Library Journal.

MaryAnn discussed the role of her college in rural New Jersey as part of the greater community including public and school libraries. Raritan Valley Community College includes the Institute for Holocaust & Genocide Studies. Holocaust and genocide studies are required of all K-12 New Jersey students, and having the center on the RVCC campus makes it a resource to students of all ages.

Earlier this year MaryAnn was invited by the Hunterdon County Library Association to do a presentation to high school and public librarians, teachers and administrators about the preparation colleges expect from high school students for doing college research. MaryAnn asked people on the listserv BI-L for suggestions on the topic. She made use of the responses she got on BI-L and prepared a PowerPoint presentation for the community audience called the "Golden Opportunity." MaryAnn also shared the slide show presentation with members of the BI listserv.

MaryAnn's use of technology to do outreach to the high school community suggests a way that those working in higher education can reach many working with high school students. In addition, her own participation in a listserv as a way to solicit collegial recommendations reminds us of another way that we can broaden our community when discussing information literacy and pre-college outreach. High School librarians may consider joining BI-L, which tends to attract academic librarians. Or, the conversation about cooperation between colleges and high schools may be expansive enough to merit the creation of a listserv exclusively for the discussion of issues in this realm.

Minutes prepared by Martha Corpus, Brooklyn College Library, May 30, 2000; edited by Beth Evans, July 25, 2000