NEW BEDFORD — Madelene Freitas-Pimentel works in the last library in New Bedford High School. As the bell rings for first period, a student ducks inside and holds up a book.
“Hi, Mikayla! You could just leave that on my desk,” Freitas-Pimentel says, smiling at the student. “That might happen a couple times,” she tells a visitor.
Throughout the day, students regularly pop into this medium-sized hexagonal room — which is about the size of two classrooms pushed together. Perhaps it’s small considering the almost 3,000 students here, in the state’s fourth-largest school. But when the building was designed, in the late 1960s, there were five or six library areas.
Now, this is the only library — not just in the school — but in one of Massachusetts’ largest public school districts.
Freitas-Pimentel started here in 2021, a time when she said many Massachusetts schools were laying off librarians.
“A lot of districts across the state are seeing the error in having laid off many of their school librarians,” she said. “Districts quickly reposted their positions a year or two later.”
She said it didn’t take long before schools realized that libraries are “more important than ever.” While in some ways students have a glut of online information, she said, they often lack tools to help them understand it all.
“The tendency is to think that they already have all the information at their disposal,” she said, “but it’s still important to think about how to navigate that information and how to think about it in an informed and critical way.”
She said that many students lack even basic computer skills — as schools have assumed kids to be digital natives and largely neglected to teach digital literacy. Some students, for example, know how to create a new slideshow or download files with ease, but no one had ever shown them keyboard shortcuts to copy, paste, or undo.
It’s hard to capture all the hats that Freitas-Pimentel wears at New Bedford High. Recently she’s been working hand-in-glove with the world languages department, building the school’s collection of foreign-language books — including books in Spanish and Portuguese.
For a recent project, a heritage Spanish class (an advanced composition class for native Spanish speakers) collaborated with her on a book project. Every student came to the library, and Freitas-Pimentel directed them through genres like historical fiction or mystery, and dispensed expert knowledge about which books were well-translated or written natively in Spanish.
Other Spanish and Portuguese books teach about American history, a collection built to target the growing number of English as a second language (ESL) students. In the last few months, more books have arrived for these ESL students, with titles like “English for everyone” and “5 words every day.”
Librarians are, she said, “an essential service and an essential support for students and staff.”
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Freitas-Pimentel will also teach as many as five class periods in a day — like when a history class came to work on a Civil War research project last week. “The role of the school library should be … that I can go into these various content areas and subjects and teach research skills.” And she said the high school’s administrators have been supportive of that role.
In yet another capacity, she supports a specialized reading department, where two teachers lead 10 classes of students through basic reading skills, phonics, and word comprehension. These classes often come to the library to explore new topics.
“They’re reading really below grade level,” she said, but “once they visit with their class and find something they like to read, they often come back, which is great. And that’s the hope.”
But as the district works to overhaul its literacy and reading programs, Freitas-Pimentel said that she has not been asked to work on those initiatives. The extent of her participation was her required attendance at two professional development workshops alongside other teachers.
“I am hopeful that [libraries] will come back,” she said. “Our district has new leadership, so they may have a different way of viewing this than the previous superintendents did.”
“I’m always going to advocate, of course, for more services for students. But I think before having more staff here, I’d love to see a program in one of the middle schools.”
For now, the ninth-grade orientation is the first time most New Bedford kids have ever interacted with a library, said Freitas-Pimentel. Many are unfamiliar with the concept.
“It is clear that many of them may not have experienced a library before. And they are surprised to hear that it’s free and that they can borrow these books, take them home, and bring them back without any cost.”
As long as this library exists, it will continue to serve students like Mikayla — the girl who rushed in to return her most recent book.
Mikayla was dropping off a dictionary of American Sign Language, and had told Freitas-Pimentel that she might want to be an interpreter some day. Her interests are “wide and varied,” Freitas-Pimentel said. Recently Mikayla had also spent a lot of time with a cookbook trying out new recipes.
Mikayla is so excited about reading, in part, because it’s so new to her, Freitas-Pimentel says; she’s a student in one of the specialized classes for struggling readers. This is the first time her school has had a library.
So it’s here that she’s learning to love books, Freitas-Pimentel says.
Email Colin Hogan at chogan@newbedfordlight.org
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This is an excellent article, bringing out the major importance of libraries, including in our schools! Thank you.