Digital Guardian

After 15 years as an elementary school classroom teacher, Fran Glick enrolled in a master’s degree program in instructional technology, with a concentration in school library media. “The moment I entered the program, my inner librarian was awakened,” she says.

Glick is now the coordinator, library media and instructional technology, for Baltimore County Public Schools (BCPS). After the district recently provided a device to each one of its 113,000 students, Glick faced a formidable challenge: come up with an information and education initiative around student safety, security, and privacy for parents, students, teachers, and Board of Education members.

Her team answered the call with BCPS’s robust Growing Up Digital website. It’s full of easy-to-understand, targeted information regarding digital citizenship for students K–12. The detailed content includes videos, parent and family guides, and interviews—and in collaboration with the School Health Council—a poster providing recommendations for healthy digital classrooms, which is displayed throughout the district.

Glick then created staff professional development resources on the rationale, laws, and procedures surrounding student data and privacy.

“School libraries provide a sense of safety in selection,” says Glick. “We honor student privacy and access to materials. We connect to our readers and, by paying attention, can serve as the trusted adult who may be called upon for support.”

Glick’s model of engaging parents, educators, kids, and other stakeholders in digital safety, student privacy, copyright awareness, cyberbullying prevention, and healthy digital lifestyles earned accolades, including the Center for Digital Education: Digital Content and Curriculum Achievement Award.

BCPS was selected as the American Association of School Librarians’ National School Library Program of the Year for 2017. Alyssa Alston, senior communications officer for BCPS and Glick’s nominator, maintains that was owing to Glick’s leadership. And Glick has recently won one of three 2018 Women in School Leadership Awards from AASA, the School Superintendents Association. “Fran Glick is a passionate advocate for school libraries and their role in student achievement,” Alston says.

Now Glick is on to meeting the next need. “We were just awarded a grant from the Maryland State Department of Education and will use the funds for working on open education resources and curation with library media specialists and content teachers,” she says. “We’re excited about using the curation tools in our Destiny catalog to sustain selection and collaboration for student learning.”