Founded in 2011, KMAM opened its doors to a small 5th grade class and has since grown to serve 395 students in the Hyde Park neighborhood of North Memphis. As our first 8th grade class gets ready to graduate in 2016, we’ve realized how our school has outgrown our old library system. Before we had reached our full enrollment, English teachers were relied upon to provide books to their students in small “classroom libraries.” This was an extremely difficult task, considering the demands of instructing English in a region where less than 30% of students read on or above their grade level.

KMAM’s culture of literacy is extremely joyful--our KIPPsters read, on average, 1 million words a week (and we have already surpassed 50 million for this school year)! Every student knows exactly what level they are reading on, and they can tell you what their reading goal for the future is. We have reading blocks every day schedule just for pleasurable, independent reading.

However, most of our books came to us donated or used, and there were consequences for our students reading so vigorously. Keeping track of our texts was extremely tricky, as teachers relied on paper and pencil or web spreadsheets for checkout and return--and we were losing or damaging about 400 books a semester!

With the Follet Destiny online catalogue system, we’ll be able to make sure that students are held accountable for each book that they check out. Better yet, because the management system is so advanced, we’ll be able to make sure that students are always reading at their specific level. This way, students will be able to improve their literacy proficiency by nearly twice the normal rate. Studies show that choice reading (within appropriately-leveled books) in a central library can boost student achievement by as much as 23%!