End of a Great Year

The Bessie Chin Library staff would like to congratulate those of you with graduating seniors, say good-bye to those whose last child is leaving Redwood and welcome the parents of incoming ninth graders. From their freshman year through graduation we like think we play a crucial part in helping students succeed and develop as young, maturing adults. We’ll miss the seniors, who have spent a lot of time in the library over the years learning how to access and use information for many school and personal projects. Our goal in the library is to graduate young adults who can think for themselves, who love literature and who can find and use information creatively and ethically. We look forward to meeting the incoming ninth graders in the fall and introducing them to all the wonderful resources of the Bessie Chin Library.

As the school year comes to a close we’d also like to express a big thank you from the whole Redwood community to our library volunteers who have performed all sorts of tasks this year to make our terrific programs so successful. A big thank you goes to returning volunteers Richard Henerlau, Peter Martin, Jessica Carroll, Jennifer Stevens, and Amalia Molineaux. And thanks to our new volunteers this year, Lynn Bullock and Angeles Herrero. No matter how many hours you were able to put in over the course of the year, your time was very much valued and appreciated. Think about joining them next fall if you’d like to provide a valuable and fun service to Redwood.

We hope everyone has a happy and restful summer and remind everybody in the Redwood community that a great way to beat the heat is to READ! Book Passage will provide a small donation to the Redwood library for every book purchased when Redwood is mentioned. Encourage your children to read “just for fun,” reading something they’d never have time for during the regular school year. Now is the time to stretch and grow in weird and wonderful ways.

Remember that even though the physical library is closed during the summer, the Redwood Learning Commons is open 24/7 all year round. You have access to a large assortment of online subscription databases from the library’s home page. You can see a list of user names (IDs) and passwords by clicking on the DATABASE PASSWORDS link and entering the word “giants” in the box.

This year has been an exciting one for the library with the addition of all sorts of new materials, continued improvements to library automation system (all the schools in the District are now sharing the same catalog database), improvements to the library website, and the addition of new databases. Next year should prove just as fruitful and we look forward to seeing you all at Back-to-School night in the fall.