Atlanta Public Schools media specialists have voted. Mary Lin Elementary’s Dr. Zenobia Johnson is the 2019-2020 APS Library Media Specialist of the Year.
All candidates must have their principals’ recommendation and at least three years of experience in the District. Johnson was elected by her media specialist colleagues based on responses to questions about her media program.
“I believe the media specialist should collaborate with teachers to design lessons to teach the standards while incorporating media, technology and promoting leisure reading,” Johnson wrote about her philosophy, vision and service goal. “My vision is to empower students to be college and career ready by encouraging them to be critical thinkers, enthusiastic readers, skillful researches and ethical users of information. This year one of our school’s goals was to improve writing. To support this goal, I collaborated with the gifted teacher in teaching the writing process and bookmaking. The culminating activity for this event was a Book-A-Bration, which celebrated students writing original picture books.”
Located in the Grady Cluster, Mary Lin Elementary School has a true passion for reading – with 164,819 minutes logged and counting towards the APS Race2Read goal.
“Promoting a culture of reading is essential to create a thriving library program where students become lifelong readers and learners,” Johnson wrote. “Our Grady Cluster signature program is College and Career Readiness. The Mary Lin Media Center plays a central role in ensuring that this goal is continually met. In the future, Mary Lin students will compete for opportunities in our global economy that will require them to not only gather information but to produce new findings from their research and be able to effectively present those findings. Therefore, my library program enables our students to become effective consumers of information while also nurturing avid and struggling readers into lifelong lovers of reading.”
Dr. Johnson began her educational career as a first-grade teacher at Glen Haven Elementary School in Decatur, Georgia. Since obtaining her master’s degree in library and information science in 2001, she served as a school library media specialist for elementary and high school levels. To learn about Mary Lin’s Media Center, click here.
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