Longview School Collection Management Plan

Mission Statement: Longview School will provide relevant and engaging educational experiences for students while cultivating their social and emotional needs that will allow them to become more productive citizens.

Vision Statement: Longview School will engage families and community members to help students grow, succeed, and excel.

School Overview

Longview School in Southeast Raleigh is an alternative school focused on academic and social emotional growth. It operates on a traditional calendar and currently serves about 40 6-12th grade students. One hundred percent of our students have IEPs and 88.3% of our students are people of color.

The collection includes 5,103 copies. The majority of the collection are books for checkout for students with a small percentage of professional titles and videos. The average age of the collection overall is 17 years (average date of publication: 2005), with the nonfiction collection being a little older. 

Our School Improvement Team’s goals are:

• All students will demonstrate growth in their math and reading skills.  

• All students will demonstrate progress towards meeting their annual IEP goals.

Selection Criteria

Materials are selected for the Longview library based on the school’s curriculum and the students’ interests and needs. We focus on purchasing titles with a wide variety of applicable information, as well as books that reflect the subjects taught in our curriculum and the experiences and identities of our student body.

The librarian focuses heavily on books that provide windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors for our students (Bishop, 1990). Books are selected after considering multiple review sources, including SLJ, YALSA, Kirkus, and Booklist, and many books are selected from award lists published by the American Library Association and National Book Foundation. We purchase and promote graphic novels and manga, which help increase visual literacy skills and are popular with our students. Special attention is given to diverse titles that reflect our school population or offer students new perspectives and promote inclusivity, especially books in which the author is a member of the group depicted in the book.

Please see Board Policy 3210 for the reconsideration of materials.

2022-2023 Focus area

• We will prioritize the purchase of manga and other graphic novels, nonfiction, and audiobooks, in order to support our students in accessing stories and information that is up-to-date and relevant to their needs and interests.

Long-term focus areas

• Continue to refresh the nonfiction collection through weeding and the purchase of new materials.

• Continue to purchase diverse titles that reflect our student population.

• Utilize display tactics and booktalks to increase circulation for academic and pleasure reading goals.

This document was last updated in November 2022. Many thanks to Caitlin Martin and Karyn Hladik-Brown for their support in the creation of this policy.