by Zach Miller
Quick Summary
Amy Reisdorf, a teacher at St. Paul's Prodeo Academy, relies on the library to enrich her students' curriculum.
Amy Reisdorf is a multilingual learner teacher at Prodeo Academy Saint Paul. For Reisdorf, the public library, and interlibrary loan (ILL) in particular, is more than a convenience, it's a necessity. At Prodeo, 85 percent of students speak Karen or Kayah (Sino-Tibetan languages spoken mostly in Thailand and Myanmar), and nearly all are on free and reduced lunch. In order to hone their language abilities, these students must have access to a variety of reading materials. Alas, Prodeo currently lacks the funding to offer a central school library.
Prodeo Academy is housed in the former St. Bernard’s Catholic School building, and outperforms the state average in standardized testing, despite its students' challenging circumstances. Reisdorf is one reason why. She is a passionate advocate for literacy and learning, and commutes over 90 minutes each day to support her third and fourth graders. Reisdorf and her colleagues do support individual classroom libraries and a "Little Free Library" concept, but the limited number of books they can provide often falls short of the students' needs.
That's where interlibrary loan makes a difference for Reisdorf and her students. "Even people like me, who don’t have a lot of money to spend on books, can get books from anywhere," she says. "Even though we don’t have a library here, ILL gives my students access to the best libraries in the state."
One example of ILL's impact in Amy's classroom came during a project on influential Americans. The class was learning about Helen Keller. A student touched a conventionally printed page and remarked, "She must have had really sensitive fingers, I can’t feel anything." Reisdorf sensed an opportunity, and turned to her home library, the Chisago Lakes Branch of East Central Regional Library, to make an ILL request. Within a week, two braille books, sourced from far-flung corners of Minnesota, had arrived at Chisago Lakes. Reisdorf brought the books to her classroom and gave her students a direct, tactile experience of braille. The books even inspired another teacher to use braille for a computer coding project.
Interlibrary loan also plays a crucial role in Reisdorf's "reading buddies" program, by supplying books for fourth graders to read with kindergarteners. It’s a great example of how ILL can build upon the limited on-site resources of a single community by connecting it with the extended and vast world of knowledge that is available through a well-coordinated library system, such as Minnesota's.
Beyond her current classroom, Reisdorf has deep personal experience with libraries that extends through the decade she spent homeschooling her children. Her daughter even leveraged interlibrary loan to obtain the curriculum she needed to earn college credit as a high school student through the CLEP and DSST programs. Thanks to the library, she only had to spend $100 out of pocket to earn three years of college credit by the time she was finished with high school.
Reisdorf helps to promote the library to her students' parents, too. The Multilingual Learner Department in which she works organizes four "parent institutes" each year, to empower parents to support their children's learning. She and her colleagues point them to the public library. It's filled with books and other materials, sure, but it's also a vital community hub for homework help and gathering, she tells them.
All in all, the library is a place of profound joy and empowerment for Reisdorf. "Oh my gosh, I always leave smiling. And I always look forward to going," she says. "I feel rich when I leave the library," she adds, recalling how "poor" she felt during COVID, when library access was restricted. From providing hotspots to offering book club kits and even mental health support, libraries, and the ILL system that expands their reach, are "vital for me, and vital for my students," says Reisdorf.
