The International Schools Review Forum

Hi all,
I'm a school librarian with 15 years experience, and I've helped design/remodel 3 libraries; I've found it's what I've really love to do. So I feel "done" with improving my current library (been there 6 years now) and I'm wondering how I go about finding an opening school and/or a school who's doing a major remodel of their library for the 2020/21 school year? I'm with Search, ISS and Carney & Sandoe, but I'm not sure if I'm missing somewhere to look for opening schools, or search terms I don't know about?

In a semi-related question, my husband is a classroom teacher (certified in social studies, 5-9 math and 6-12 gen. science), but he's never helped in the opening/founding of a school (and always being on the librarian side of it, I never had the time to pay attention to what the teachers are doing). So, I would appreciate if anyone had any insight I can pass onto him what he might be doing while I'm busy with furniture plans and vendors. Thanks so much for any insight you can give me!

TIE will occasionally do a story or announcement of new ISs, and ISs will include in their vacancy postings if they are new (and if they arent its relatively easy to find out). There arent enough librarian vacancies on the circuit to really justify some kind of specific niche service like that. ISs advertise newly renovated libraries if anything not that they want too or are going too. Youre probably just going to have to have to cover the agencies and individually research each one to see if they are keen for a remodel.

Its a lot of work founding an IS. The benefit is you get a lot of freedom in the classroom as everything is new, the major disadvantage is everything is new and nothings established and there are a lot of growing pains. A lot really does depend on the leadership team, if executive leadership has done a new IS a couple times a lot of problems get smoothed out before they hit the classrooms, if not then everything trickles don sometimes in sprinkles and sometimes in torrents of confusion and frustration.
The middle ground is a chain IS opening a new campus or branch, they usually have done it in a cookie cutter fashion enough times there arent as many growing pains.

Thanks PsyGuy; that's pretty much what I expected, but I just wanted to be sure I wasn't missing something everyone else knew about! Cheers

I could be wrong though, another member might come back with better data.

iblibrarian wrote:
> I'm wondering how I go about finding an opening school
> and/or a school who's doing a major remodel of their library for the
> 2020/21 school year?

You could try asking here: https://www.facebook.com/schlibcon/
Or here: http://intllead.org/
Or here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/SLAsia/

In my previous posting I was a school founder, and it was the best experience of my teaching career. Beginning everything from scratch, building as a new team, creating a community with students and families are all things that I loved being part of. I also had an amazing and inspiring HOS, which greatly added to the experience.

As I've recently stepped into a new position, and was left quite a mess to clean-up, I find I long for the days of school founding, where one does not inherit the mess of another.

That being said, if your husband is a teacher who likes order and can't deal with chaos, being a school founder will be challenging. It can be fairly messy in the beginning, even with organized leadership. However during that time he will learn life changing skills that will impact his career forever.

I had a few roles in my previous school, and for my teaching role I did the following - put together massive ordering lists (if he is art, P.E. or science this can be super time consuming), collaborate on anything and everything, build up the advisory program, develop lessons/units from scratch, potentially investigate standards to adopt, the list goes on.

Founding a school was the best experience I ever had as a teacher. I highly recommend it, however it is not for everyone. If a teacher is inflexible, school founding is not necessarily for them.