Meet the Blackstone Elementary School Librarian - Barbara Landolfi
/The Blackstone Elementary School Library has been a long term partnership between BPS and SSYP. As of the start of the academic year BPS made the choice to invest in the Blackstone Library by hiring a full time librarian, Barbara Landolfi. SSYP continues to be committed to the success of the Blackstone Library and to our wonderful volunteers there, but without further ado, meet Barbara!
Hi! My name is Barbara Landolfi, and I recently joined the faculty at the Blackstone School at 380 Shawmut Avenue in Boston’s South End as their full-time librarian. Our school serves grades K through 6th grade, and the student body is made up of nearly 600 children living within every neighborhood in the city of Boston. I am proud to serve a broad and diverse group of students from many different cultures and nationalities. Our teachers and our students speak, at last count, 8 different languages making our work as educators enlightening and exciting every day. The kids teach us every day!
I grew up in the city of Boston and have been teaching in Boston Public Schools for more than 24 years, starting my career, at the Dearborn School in Roxbury and most recently at the Jackson Mann School in Brighton, MA. I am a certified Social Studies teacher and I have worked with students at all grade levels, but most of my time has been spent teaching middle school students in both history and civics. I love both subject disciplines, perhaps, it is because I am a first generation American, and both my parents emigrated to the United States in the early 1970’s. They always touted the virtues of being an American and constantly spoke about education, freedom and the rights entitled to all Americans. They also instilled in me gratitude and acceptance for different cultures and races.
I am bilingual enabling me to communicate with a portion of our students that either originated from the island of Cape Verde or speak it currently, but more importantly my immigrant background allows me to serve our students with an enhanced level of compassion and empathy given I have done what they are being asked to do. I am proud that I had the privilege of growing up and teaching in such a diverse city, like Boston, that has worked hard, over the years, to become a more inclusive community. It wasn’t always easy having parents that spoke a different language at home, but fortunately I grew up in a neighborhood that was diverse, and I was not the only child/student with parents and families from another country. These challenges allowed me to find comfort in other people from other nationalities where we learned to lean on each other with our shared experiences. These experiences have made me a more enlightened teacher in a school system that requires many different skills and sometimes unique resources to create the ideal learning environment our students to excel.
I am new to the library environment at the Blackstone, but our mission is clear. Our mission at the school is to deliver first rate library services to our students and faculty. I was hired, not because of my library experiences, but for my long track record of being an effective educator with compassion and discipline skills in a system that requires a unique skill set different from that of a traditional librarian.
Did I mention I have a lot of help! I had a running start with all my efforts from our many talented and giving volunteers. The Blackstone School, prior to my arrival, relied heavily on a network of volunteers to support the school’s library efforts to provide services. I came into a community that had 8 fully committed part time volunteers from St. Stephen’s Youth Programs’ community. Their organization started working with the Blackstone school in 2010 committing both time and money to the school’s library efforts and working hard to improve the library experience for our students.
I want to recognize their efforts by sharing with you their names and their contributions. Kim Paddock, Paula Ewenstein, Stephanie Terry, Susan Haskell, Maria Johnson, Lucy Costa, Maria Huhta and Patty Woodlock all of whom are dedicated and committed to helping our students achieve every day. They avail themselves every week to reading for our students, helping to organize our efforts in the library, and most of all showing our students the power of literacy and its beneficial effect on learning and discovery.