Greenbrier Middle School library media specialist Erin Shaw was beside herself over an email from Jordan Sonnenblick.
He wrote, among other young-adult novels, Drums, Girls and Dangerous Pie. To Shaw, he’s a celebrity.
“I was so excited,” she said on a recent day. “I’m trying to get him to do an author visit.”
Shaw’s enthusiasm for books and love of programming for kids may explain why she was chosen as the 2014 Arkansas Association for Instructional Media’s Library Media Specialist of the Year.
“I really don’t know why I just won over everyone else. I think it’s what everybody else wrote,” Shaw said. “I think a lot of what our faculty said that I did — I work well with the teachers, collaborate with them, teaching our students not just about books, but then about research skills, technology. I did a big districtwide author visit a couple of years ago.”
It was one of her favorite authors-turned-friend, Kimberly Willis Holt.
“Greenbrier is amazing. … When they knew we were having this author visit, this parent walked in with a $1,000 check and said, ‘Buy whatever you need for this author visit,’” Shaw said.
She was recommended for the media-specialist honor by longtime friend Tracy McAllister, the library media specialist at Bob Courtway Middle School in Conway.
“Erin is someone who works really diligently to help her students love reading,” McAllister said. “She realizes that because there is so much going on in the school day, reading can sometimes take a back seat, so she looks for innovative ways to help her kids stay connected to reading and stay connected to authors. She has authors come in every year.”
Shaw, who turns 44 years old today, said her love of reading started when she was growing up in Nashville, Illinois.
“I loved to read, and I was on the swim team. I did everything. I did a lot of things outside. I was either at our public library or swimming pool because we didn’t have air conditioning,” she said.
“We never had a TV in our living room — ever,” she said.
Shaw’s parents, who live near her in Greenbrier, still don’t have one.
“They have the most amazing bookshelves. … My dad just built one for me,” she said.
Her father, an accountant, got a job in Conway when she was a senior in high school, and Shaw stayed in Illinois to graduate. She later went to Little Rock, and her parents moved to Texas.
A bookworm, she also loved science.
“I wanted to be a marine biologist, so when I did graduate, I really wanted to go to Scripps Institute for Oceanography in California,” she said.
Even though she had a biology scholarship to another university, she ended up at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway for a couple of years.
During Shaw’s second year of college, she made a significant revelation.
“I found out I get seasick — ridiculously seasick,” she said, laughing.
Her future husband was in chemistry class with her, but she didn’t get introduced to him until the summer.
After that, she went to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and earned a secondary-education degree in biology.
“When I graduated, I worked out at Woolly Hollow [State Park] as a lifeguard each summer. I didn’t have a teaching job. I really didn’t know what I was going to do,” she said.
She lived in an apartment garage at the home of a friend and his wife, and applied for jobs in the Greenbrier, Morrilton and Conway school districts.
Three days before school started, she was in St. Louis, Missouri, to attend her grandfather’s funeral, and a Morrilton district official called and said, “We need you here on Thursday.”
She taught eighth- and ninth-grade science for seven years, and in 2000, she got a job as Morrilton High School librarian.
She credits Mona Kaye Scroggins, a former Morrilton Junior High School librarian, with suggesting the career change.
“When I first started teaching, I was just going to do science forever,” Shaw said.
Shaw said she liked to do research with her science kids, and Scroggins asked her to bring her students in so Scroggins could teach them to use the online data base.
“I would always come up with a research project. She is who suggested, probably after the first or second year I was teaching, ‘Are you going to get your master’s? Have you ever thought about the library?’
“I said, ‘No, but I love the library.’ She said, ‘I think you’d be really good.’”
Even though the title is library media specialist, Shaw doesn’t split hairs on her title.
“I am a librarian,” she said. “I’m not just super techy. I’m getting so much better,” she said.
Shaw earned a master’s degree in educational media/library science and is working on a doctorate in instructional design and technology at the University of Memphis.
She and her family live in Centerville, 10 miles east of Greenbrier.
“I was driving 45 miles one way, and I had two kids,” Shaw said about working in Morrilton.
Getting a job in Greenbrier was her goal.
“Every time a job came open, I’d apply. I knew the Lord had a plan, but it took awhile to see it.”
Before making it to Greenbrier, she got a job in 2003 in the Conway School District at Bob Courtway Middle School as the media specialist, and in 2004, she took a position as library media specialist at Greenbrier Middle School.
Middle school “is kind of that make-or-break-you time,” as far as reading goes, she said.
Shaw pulled on her experiences as a middle school student for the position.
“I had been a huge reader at my middle school. I had the best middle school librarian ever, Mr. Philip Orr,” she said. “I read all the Nancy Drews, Laura Ingalls Wilder,” she said.
What she didn’t know, she said, is what boys like to read.
“I try everything I can,” she said.
When a student comes into the library, Shaw said, she tries to find out what he’s interested in.
“The first thing, when a kid comes in, and they look like they’re struggling, I ask, “What do you like? What’s the best book you’ve ever read?” If a child says he likes to hunt and fish, Hatchet, by Gary Paulsen, is her go-to book.
This tact even worked with her husband, who isn’t a big reader.
When they were on a plane, she took Hatchet. Her husband devoured the book in no time flat.
“He said, ‘Is there another one?’ I said, ‘Yes, it’s packed in the luggage.’
“That’s why I’m so excited about Jordan Sonnenblick. I remember reading his book, and it was told from an eighth-grade boy’s point of view. It’s a sad book. He tells it with humor, even for a subject that isn’t humorous.”
Shaw and her friend Tracy McAllister were once on a plane going to a library conference, Shaw picked out a woman to sit by that she thought looked nice and quiet, and they struck
up a conversation.
It turned out the woman was Kimberly Willis Holt, author of The Water Seeker and the award-winning When Zachary Beaver Came to Town, “one of my absolute favorite books,” Shaw said.
She got Holt’s phone number, and when another author fell through at the last minute for a conference Shaw was in charge of in Eureka Springs, Shaw called Holt, and she came to the conference, as well as the Greenbrier School District.
They’ve become friends, and Shaw has been to Holt’s home in Arlington, Texas.
“I think she is the most wonderful person,” Shaw said.
She said getting to know authors personally and introducing them to her students and parents are part of what she loves about her job.
“I think that’s part of why I won [Media Specialist of the Year] — having that community bond. And I love the students. I get excited; I get passionate about books.”
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.