Springfield Township High School Library Annual Report—June 2012 Celebrating our library!
Highlights of 2011/2012 • Migrated all library pathfinders to LibGuides platform • Planned and hosted two OneBook,OneSpringfield programs and co-hosted Community Film Night • Hosted two student teachers • Introduced curation as research strategy • Introduced infographics as a research product • Launched statewide digital collection curation initiative with LSTA funding • Launched #swvbc (Somewhat Virtual Book Club) • Hosted live and virtual author visits • Added inspirational word wall, computer chairs, and cozy group space • Planned and launched our new Creative Commons media production space with students • Forged new connections with ESL and Special Education classes • Selected as EduBlogs’ Lifetime Achievement Award recipient • Presented at TEDxPhillyed, as well as international keynotes at IFLA and ECIS
This report is meant to be viewed online. Please visit our Virtual Library (http:// springfieldlibrary.wikispaces .com) for easy access to
links.
• Selected as a Library Media Connection Leading Visionary of the Learning Commons Concept • Published Reading Remixed in April Educational Leadership • Continued integration of Web 2.0 tools and digital storytelling into curriculum and introduced new research tools and learning strategies • Library functioned as hub for research, production, and presentation: a learning commons 2011/2012 was a year focused on new partnerships, reading promotion, curation, and rethinking our library as a hybrid learning commons. Students visit our library both formally and informally to engage in inquiry projects, work in groups, write traditional research papers, tell digital stories, explore new books, borrow ereaders, search scholarly journal databases, discover real-time search tools, document sources with online citation generators, present the results of their research, describe their newly installed art work, build research wikis, participate with experts and authors in online teleconferences, produce media, and collaborate using cloud-based applications. Our collection continues to grow in new directions, evidenced by the continual circulation of cameras, headsets, and e-readers. Our virtual presence is robust and dynamic. Students know that their library is always open and our impressive Virtual Library statistics reflect serious and ubiquitous use by learners.
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Curricular Highlights I continue to work with our students and faculty integrating both the AASL and ISTE NETS standards into our curriculum. This involves introducing learners to a broad toolkit of research and communication tools and coaching them through the research process--from questioning; through identifying and using the best sources; through creating and publishing their knowledge products. This year I developed much closer working relationships with our ESL, Test Prep, Creative Writing, and Life Skills classes. Because communication is ideally the end product of successful research, we continue to emphasize communicating effectively--from a renewed presentation reform effort to publishing students’ writing online. As students prepare products for publication, we emphasize the growing Creative Commons movement, using images, video, and music from portals of more liberally licensed intellectual property and work with learners to develop understanding into daily library instruction. LibGuides became a familiar and trusted platform for student research and instruction. This application allows me to push out all the resources I use for teaching and to better organize research tools, databases, and pathfinders for learners and teachers. Most of our existing Guides grew dramatically over the year. We added new Young Adult Literature, ESL,Test Prep, Educational Research, Current Events, and Student Project Guides to the collection, as well as many pages to existing Guides. We continually get requests from other librarians who want to use our Guides as templates for their own. Digital storytelling tools like VoiceThread, Animoto, Glogster, and ToonDoo, were commonplace strategies for presenting the results of student research. Students used digital publishing tools to share more traditional writing products and their art. Whenever possible, we archived and shared the artifacts of student work and gathered them on the Virtual Library. We were disappointed that we could not share some of the best of our students’ digital stories in a District Digital Storytelling Festival. New instructional highlights: For the second year, Marlene Thornton’s Creative Writing classes, published their children’s books and their song parodies, and inanimate object scripts in a variety of media on our wiki anthology. We hosted special milk and cookie receptions for the picture books’ debut. Christine Settino’s ESL students became frequent visitors and library favorites. With student teacher, Kathie Jackson, we hosted an ESL Olympics event that celebrated students’ heritage and involved in a fun and surprisingly competitive information skills events. Later in the spring semester, after preparing multiple drafts, these students shared moving digital stories of their immigration experiences at Diversity Day. In the fall we introduced curation tools as new search strategies to many of our classes. We also introduced curation platforms as current awareness tools for Senior Project research. Ashely Fusarelli and I introduced Infographics as a new student product for her Honors Global Studies class in the fall semester. We archived the lesson and artifacts of student work in this LibGuide.
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About Reading Our student Book Club grew physically and somewhat virtually this year. Throughout the year, our club partnered with clubs around the country in what we called the #swvbc (SomeWhat Virtual Book Club). Our students engaged in live discussion with those other high school clubs. Among the titles we discussed this year: John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars and a film/book discussion of Hugo. We hosted two successful One Book, One Springfield events. On March 14, Voices of Excellence students led the discussion of Silent Thunder: Breaking Through Cultural, Racial, and Class Barriers in Motorsports with visiting author Leonard Miller. On May 16, teachers Andy Dippell and Bethann Olesen led a discussion of Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun. To celebrate National Poetry Month, our students joined others across the country in a national favorite poem sharing session. To celebrate World Read Aloud Day (#WRAD), some of our Book Club members hosted a series of brief lunchtime author visits with New Canaan (CT) High School and Van Meter (IA) High School.
Author Len Miller with Voices of Excellence students
In addition to Len Miller, our students had further connections with authors. On April 24th we hosted well-known young adult author, James Kennedy. James divided the day between the High School and the Middle School and ended in a marathon discussion of Order of Odd-Fish with our Book Club. He also spent time critiquing Jelli Vezzosi’s original dramatic work. Thanks to our PTA for the mini-grant that funded this live visit. On April 25th, author Libba Bray joined our chat room and spent more than an hour chatting with our students and their book club counterparts across the country about her novel Beauty Queens. Our students led the highly successful webinar session. On May 30th we were honored to host another live discussion with another highly popular author, Lauren Myracle. Lauren discussed her latest novel, Shine, and once again Springfield students hosted and managed the webinar. For me it was a thrill seeing our students’ excited response when a famous author entered our chat and how they were able to engage in very personal discussions with their favorite rock star heroes! The Kindles we purchased last year with PTA funds were even more popular this year. They were in continual circulation. Minigrants from the PTA helped us to regularly update titles and immediately meet student demand for newly published books. Our Kindles are now loaded with classics, reading list titles, Book Club titles, and lots of popular fiction. Our new Young Adult Lit LibGuide highlights young adult literature and facilitates online connections between readers and authors. The most popular non-curricular fiction titles this year were Mockingjay, Catching Fire, (Hunger Games trilogy sequels),Glass Castle, The Help, Thirteen Reasons Why, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, and Divergent.
Far from killing reading, digital technologies are helping young readers become more engaged in books than ever. With collaborator Wendy Stephens, I published “Reading Remixed” in the March issue of Educational Leadership. The piece centered on observations of our own students’ new out-of-class, social reading habits and features their quotes and their photography.
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Materials Borrowed by Group
James Kennedy had students and teachers captivated!
Visits from Lauren Myracle and Libba Bray
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Class Visits and Usage Patterns A total of 1091 classes visited this year, in addition to heavy use by study hall students. We see approximately 200 additional students each day informally. Library use and influence is no longer necessarily a physical event. Our website statistics are part of a new metric for service. Students in classrooms using laptops continue to use library services through our collaboratively-developed units and pathfinders and Spartan Guides, through our databases, and the other resources our Virtual Library provides. I receive and answer frequent remote reference questions from students while they are at school and from home. Heaviest class use came from Social Studies (52%) and English (18%) classes. September, October, March, April, and May were our busiest months. A number of clubs call our library home, among them: Art Gallery, Interact, Book Club, Interact, Literary Magazine, and the new Students for Feminism SIG. In addition to visiting classes, an average of 200 students visit the library each day on their own time--before and after school, and during lunch and study hall. Wednesday night usage continued steadily with a total of 271 students taking advantage of Honor Society tutoring and available library resources and technology. The busiest months for Wednesday visits were November, January, and March. Among the Gallery exhibits we hosted were: Dreams and Illusions and Simple and Complex (in collaboration with the visiting student artists from Italy). We are grateful to Casey Arlen for staffing the library on Wednesday evenings.
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Our Interface and Online Services Our Virtual Library is a mashup of embedded, interactive Web tools. In the winter, student teacher Kathie Jackson and I developed a new mobile site so that students might carry our library on their smart phones and tablets. Through our homepage wiki, students may access to many Guides, databases, media, tools for production and communication, news, e-books, our weekly calendar, our Flickr galleries, reading lists, and much more. In a school with a high computer to student ratio, our virtual efforts are critical. Through our hybrid services, we are able to reach learners whether they are home, in their classrooms, or in our library. Our Guides to specific research tasks, represent both implicit and explicit instruction and supplement face-to-face instruction, presenting students with their information choices and tools for analysis, synthesis, collaboration, production, and communication. Our Virtual Library Homepage was visited 67,107 times this year. It served as an index to our Spartan LibGuides collection. September, October, February and March was the months of heaviest use. The Spartan Guide to Research Tools, offers guidance through the research process as well as information regarding copyright and fair use; search; thesis and question development; organizing and synthesizing materials, and writing. The Guides we launched in February 2011 experienced extremely impressive use this school year: • Databases and Pathfinder 56,659 views • New Tools,17,744 views • Research Tools 37,593 views Pages used most frequently within Database and Pathfinders were the General Databases Homepage, and Lit Crit pages. Even our newest Guides experienced serious use:
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Young Adult Lit. (3148 views) Test Prep. (721 views) ESL (979 views) For Teachers (1097 views) Current Events (1504 views) Student Projects (launched in May, 229 views)
Our students’ research, music, and historical re-enactments, contributed to this year’s statewide LSTA/IMLS-funded digital curation project led to the creation of a LibGuide on the Civil War in Pennsylvania that was shared with Mrs. Corbett in Harrisburg as a proof of concept to support libraries and curation tools.
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LibGuides Use 2011 and 2012
NEW GUIDES
New Mobile Site
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About our collection We added 870 items to the collection this year, making our total number of available items 33,417. We continue to make use of PaperbackSwap as an effective strategy for addressing student and faculty requests. The service is free and efficient and allows us to quickly meet student needs. Our notion of collection has expanded over the past few years. We offer streaming media subscription services, audiobooks, e-readers, databases, pathfinders, and assorted supplies and equipment. The PTA’s generous mini-grants for Amazon gift cards to feed our three Kindles, allowed us to immediately meet demand for requested titles. Headsets, cameras, tripods, and flashdrives fly across our circulation desk, as do supplies--lots of index cards, highlighters, and tissues. The library is the go-to place when a student needs anything. Student work, both on- and offline are also part of what we consider collection. As the headquarters for the Pennsylvania Young Adult Top Forty Committee, we processed $74,419 worth of new titles and shared them with librarian Committee members around the state. Our participation again resulted in a bounty of new titles for our own readers. This source of new books allows us to focus spending on areas of critical need and to support our subscription database and ebook collections. This year we requested 67 interlibrary loan items from other participating ACCESS PA libraries. We loaned 47 of our own items to other libraries. Our total book circulation was 2057. January, February, and May were the months of highest activity. Highest areas of circulation were: fiction, art, and history. Books supporting current projects fill our many carts in the library and are frequently delivered to classrooms. We do not measure this substantial use of books. Book circulation is not what it used to be and it may not be a real measure of library use. Fiction is circulating more, perhaps because of our increased focus on our reading culture. As for nonfiction and reference (which doesn’t circulate), the number of books on tables and in the labs at the end of each day suggests continued use of print. Use of library databases, with our wide collection of ebooks and online resources continues to grow.
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Database Use Our subscription databases support student research across grades and curricula, offering high quality sources in a variety of formats--journals, magazines, newspapers, e-books, video, etc. They prepare our learners for the type of energetic, academic research that will be required of them at the university level and they will be useful in meeting the complex text and critical argument requirements called for by the Common Core State Standards. Our Gale databases, especially the reference ebooks of the Gale Virtual Reference Library, were heavily used.
JSTOR, our database of exclusively scholarly content, is another clear student favorite, particularly among our upperclassmen. Students performed 20,181 JSTOR searches this past school year. User statistics by discipline reveal that JSTOR searches were heaviest in the areas of American studies, history, language and literature, sociology, and political science. Other heavily used databases, included our ProQuest databases, especially Historical Newspapers. Our Spartan Guides platform allows me to better highlight our database and e-book collections by discipline and by assignment. I am eager to create more Guides over the summer and next school year. Over the past three years, budget cuts in Harrisburg have seriously limited the resources once provided by the Access PA POWER Library. It is important that our library continue to fund these resources that serve Springfield students across grades and disciplines.
Popular Databases
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Staff, student teachers, and volunteers! Our library is fortunate to be staffed by able assistants Casey Arlen and Patty Gee. Casey and Patty manage our behind-the-desk operations, the collection, the budget, and our heavy communications with publishers for the Young Adult Top Forty initiative. They make every learner feel welcome and they are largely responsible for our library’s warm atmosphere. Because of their efforts, I am able to spend time working directly with teachers and learners and to visit classrooms. Casey keeps our library open on Wednesday nights. During these valuable two hours, National Honor Society students tutor any other students who sign up for help. Casey Arlen shoots many of the photographs that archive life at Springfield, including this year’s Students of the Month. We had a variety of student volunteers helping out during free blocks. Rhoda Gansler (former teacher and a STHS grandmother) continues to help process new materials, create displays and promotional items, and test out new tools for instruction. Practicum Students We hosted two student teachers this school year: Chrissy Sirianni from Drexel and Kathie Jackson from Arcadia. Kathie helped substantially with our PSLA Top Forty preparation and presentation this spring and worked especially closely with our ESL class. Chrissie helped launch our YA Literature LibGuide with the help of Book Club students.
Rethinking the physical space This spring, we were able to purchase a few pieces of updated furniture. Students instantly fell in love with the new wheelie chairs that replaced ten of our damaged chairs in the pod and strip area. Four new cozy chairs, along with a repurposed coffee table turned into a usable work table by our carpenter, created a new space that now functions extremely well for conferencing with students about their projects and for group work.
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Our new Creative Commons lab! At the end of this school year, we opened our new Creative Commons lab, an area we hope will inspire creativity and knowledge production. Supported by a generous donation from the Altman Family, the space was designed (with learners) to allow groups to collaborate on media projects, host professional development activities, and much more. Students were involved in the planning and the design of the space--helping to select the equipment, software, furniture and colors. Next year, I will be counting on a team of labsters to help manage it as well. The lab includes five desktop Macs--loaded with the Microsoft Office Suite, iLife and iWorks, and more--three high top tables, 22 swivel stools, a large countertop, a large screen monitor which can be displayed in both the lab and the instructional area, five drawing tablets, and a green screen with frame. The tables and the countertop offer network drops and opportunities to charge laptops or mobile devices. It is our hope that long after the those new desktops are retired, the space will continue to function as a popular spot for students and teachers with their personal devices. In the week since we opened the lab, it is already the most popular destination in the library. Students race each other for a desktop.
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My colleagues from the Australian company, Syba Signs, sent the gift of an inspirational word wall this fall. Our library continues to serve as event central. We host many evening and after-school receptions, meetings, and showers.
Other Services I regularly email individual teachers and departments announcing new resources and emerging Web search and instructional tools. Many of these wonderful tips come from my extensive PLN (personal learning network). Most mornings I start the day sharing relevant tips and links from my Twitter, Diigo, Scoop.it, and Paper.li connections, as well as posts from my School Library Journal blog. Our Google Doc Library Use Calendar, reminds teachers of sign-up times and allows them to check availability for spontaneous classroom visits. Our Library maintains a photographic record of everything Springfield through two Flickr feeds on the Virtual Library homepage. Students are continually drawn to images of themselves at work and play on the Springfield Township High School gallery. We highlight the work of our student artists in our physical space as well as in our Springfield Flickr Gallery. Artists install and critique their work in our library. Student curators manage both the physical and online galleries. This year’s shows included Dreams and Illusions and Simple and Complex. We welcome student collaboration on our display cases. Among the most popular this past year were They Spoke Out (a primary source history of activism), Teen Book Awards, Teacher Super Heroes, and the ever-exciting Senior Plans display.
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Visits! This year again our library was honored to host a variety of visiting groups. On November 4, filmmakers from the Lucas Foundation’s Edutopia spent the day filming and learning about the role of the school library and information technology in the high school program. We acted as headquarters for the visiting teachers and students of the WAVE Program from Italy. We hosted an ISTE meeting in the fall and on May 23, in cooperation with the University of Pennsylvania, we hosted a team of visiting tech teachers and librarians from Kazakstan.
Professional accomplishments Professionally, this has been another rewarding year. I was most honored to be selected by my peers for the Edublogs Lifetime Achievement Award. My blogs inspire me to continually reflect on my practice and make new discoveries. Most of what I discover and share impacts Springfield’s library program. My SLJ NeverEndingSearch blog was nominated for Best Library Blog, I was delighted that the #tlchat Twitter hashtag I initiated a couple of years ago, received the award for best educational hashtag. I helped plan AASL’s upcoming Fall Forum and served on ALA’s Office of Information and Technology Policy Committee and helped select ALA’s Leading Edge Library Program winners. I also planned and hosted monthly webinars for the TLCafe. I was asked to present at several national and international conferences this year. I presented at Alan November’s Building Learning Communities, delivered a keynote at the IFLA Conference in Puerto Rico, spoke about curation at AASL’s Treasure Mountain research retreat, and hosted a vendor panel at School Library Journal’s Fall Summit. I presented and keynoted at several regional and state conferences, including the MASL conference in Hyannis, the WLMA Conference in Spokane, and the NYLA Conference in Binghamton. I hosted a conversation at edCamp Philly and the Educon unconferences. Throughout the year, I presented virtually at a variety of other state and regional conferences via such telecommunication tools as Skype and Google+ Hangouts.
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Locally, I served on the District Professional Development and Technology Committees and completed a draft of a new policy with the Academic Integrity Committee. I also sponsored our Student Book Club, co-sponsored the Student Art Gallery, helped launch the Students for Feminism SIG, and worked with the Senior Awards Committee. This year, I presented professional development workshops on building PLNs and digital storytelling. With an IMLS grant, Deb Kachel (PSLA) and I initiated Digital Collection Curation workshops statewide. Beginning in the summer, we trained hundreds of school and public librarians to more effectively scale their digital practice. I hosted a well-attended Curation workshop for the School District of Philadelphia at our library on March 17. Within the Springfield school community, we hosted three One Book One Springfield events. One of these was the successful Movie Night at the Ambler Theater, sponsored in collaboration with Retina. The very special evening featured a performance by our Jazz Band, a showing of the classic film, To Kill a Mockingbird preceded by a thoughtful introduction of the film by Book Club members. We are grateful for the support of many merchants in the community for their generous sponsorship. My most personally rewarding opportunity this year was the TEDxPhillyEd talk I presented at Wharton prior to the ISTE Conference last June. This coming summer I will again present sessions at the national ISTE conference in San Diego, Alan November’s Building Learning Communities and at three library events in Australia. I look forward to speaking in Qatar and Beijing in the coming year.
Publications and networks Over this school year, in addition to my blog posts for School Library Journal and Technology & Learning, I published the following chapters and articles:
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Valenza, J.K. (2012) “Curation.” School Library Monthly, Sept. Valenza, J.K. and Gwyneth Jones. (2012) “What Librarians Teach. (Poster). Library Media Connection, April Valenza, J.K. and Wendy Stephens. (2012) “Reading Remixed: Observations from the Floor.” Educational Leadership, March. Valenza, J.K. (2012) Eight Ways to Create Screencasts and Slideshares. Tech & Learning. April. Valenza, J.K. (2011) “In My Network Confession.” Teacher Librarian, 39 (2), 27-32.
I continue to host the TeacherLibrarian Ning, an international social networking site for teacher-librarians, now with more than 6645 members, to coordinate TLChat Twitter hashtag, as well as the LM_NET wiki, an online document annex for the popular international electronic mailing list.
april 2012
Best of the Best The
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TEACHER LIBRARIAN RECOGNIZES VISIONARY LEADERS OF THE LEARNING COMMONS CONCEPT THE CREATION OF THE EDGEWOOD EXPERIENTIAL LAB AND LEARNING COMMONS FOR THE 21ST-CENTURY LEARNER ENGAGING STUDENTS WITH AASL’S BEST WEBSITES FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING CANADIAN RESOURCES: THE BEST OF 2011 TIPS & TACTICS: SEPARATING THE WHEAT FROM THE CHAFF: A GUIDE TO WEEDING
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THE BEST SOURCES OF INFORMATION FOR COMMON CORE STANDARDS, MARCH 2012 BEST, NOTABLE, AND RECOMMENDED BOOKS, 2012
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Issues Incidents of plagiarism continued this year. We hope that our draft of an Academic Integrity Policy will be discussed and implemented as a guide for teachers and students. The Common Core Standards, will focus instruction on complex text and on developing arguments based on evidence, I hope we can renew our school-wide focus on research skills. Many members of our current faculty were not around for the whole-school research initiative implemented several years back. We need to initiate conversations regarding the importance of inquiry and inspiring challenging, original student work. Despite our fabulous new five-station Creative Commons, our other computers are showing signs of age and are often frustratingly slow to boot. We hope that the upgrade performed at the end of the school year will remedy the situation and we hope replacement equipment may be installed sooner than the two year estimate. .
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Plans and goals Over the course of the coming 2012/2013 school year, I will continue to encourage a Springfield reading culture, by highlighting new titles, growing the student Book Club, and promoting attendance at our One Book One Springfield events. I am currently working with School Library Journal to scale our virtual author visits, beyond our six participating schools, to include readers all over the country. I will be working on the American Association of School Librarians November Fall Forum October AASL Conference, on the YALSA and IASL Research Committees and on the Review Committee of the Journal of Media Literacy Education. I will also continue to chair the PSLA Top Forty Committee. Next school year, I’ve been asked to keynote at the IASL Conference in Qatar in November and at the Association of China and Mongolia International Schools Conference in March. Over the summer I hope to move the remainder of our website over to the LibGuides platform and create an easier to navigate home page. I will be building new LibGuides for Business and Sociology and I hope to encourage student and faculty collaboration on these Guides across grade levels and content areas. My goal is to pull together lessons and student products regardless of the platform. I’d like to also introduce the notion of having students maintain their own reflective portfolios of their work throughout high school. While formal class visits have declined a bit, our Virtual Library continues to thrive as a vibrant learning space and our physical space buzzes with production and creativity, as a hub of the school. Next year we will be ensuring that our new Creative Commons media lab is used productively. I plan to use study hall volunteers as lab guides and mentors. And I hope our students will help grow the lab as we incorporate emerging technologies. I’d like to use the new lab as a base for informal professional development opportunities in the form of Learning Lunches and after-school workshops. I plan to encourage more visits by the departments underrepresented in our statistics, by suggesting new ideas for projects and by sharing more about compelling curricular resources and library services! Our learning commons continues to morph and grow. As I watch our students and teachers use our Virtual Library, and imagine the use I cannot see--at all hours of the day, wherever our students are working and creating--it is also clear to me that our users enter our space through both its front doors. Library at Springfield Township High School is a dynamic, hybrid experience.
Respectfully submitted,
Joyce Kasman Valenza