Melissa Brumbaugh: Solo Librarian

The first week of school has everyone going hectic with new schedules, new teachers, and new classes. With new classes comes new books, and this year, book check out went a bit different than previous years.

 Melissa Brumbaugh, the only school librarian this year, checked out 1,088 books all last week to the classes, not including the college ones.

 She got the students their books in three days by going to the classes and checking them out class by class. This system was put in place due to the conditions that COVID-19 has put the school in, and it worked so well that Brumbaugh believes they may keep the procedure in the upcoming years. 

Before her years in the library, students may have seen Brumbaugh around the school as a paraprofessional or the detention aide for about seven years before becoming the test coordinator. As test coordinator, Brumbaugh is the one who organizes all the testings in the school including ISAT’s, SAT’s, PSAT’s and any AP tests that students may choose to take.

Organizing tests and checking out books was not what Brumbaugh had envisioned for herself when she was younger. After volunteering for the district when her daughter had been in her early years of school, she found that she didn’t want to leave that community any time soon. 

Brumbaugh stated that, “this is my thirteenth year, it’s kind of hard seeing myself doing anything else.”

So after 13 years of working for the district, going from working with individual students to being able to help out the whole school, Brumbaugh begins this year as the school’s only librarian, helping out the students with whatever they may need. She’s always around the school, in the library or computer lab, working for the school that she is immensely proud of.