 All right, so next up on our lightning rounds is Lori Julin, she is the Library Director at the Howardan Public Library in Howardan, Iowa, just next door to us. And she's gonna talk about student access cards, providing students with the tools they need to succeed. So go ahead, Lori. Okay, I'm Lori, the Director at Haywarden Public Library. I live in extreme Northwest Iowa. I'm about a mile from the South Dakota border. And about 45 minutes north of Sioux City. So not too far from my home state of Nebraska, where I grew up. One of the reasons we started this program is because I had students coming in, they didn't have cards and they wanted to use our resources and prior policy required a parent signature for students under the age of 18. We did modify that policy, but many students couldn't get in with a parent. So student access cards were born. A lot of people ask, well, how do you start something like that? I did have to work and reach out to the local school district. We serve, our local school district serves Haywarden and Irton, which is about 10 miles away. Both towns are relatively small. Total student body is less than a thousand students. So we started out using with the middle school and high school, which represents about four to 500 students. I reached out to the principal of the middle school. I said, hey, is there any reason we can't, we could start something like this where we literally just provide a card to every single student. They don't need a parent signature. They can just access our resources. They were very enthusiastic. The principal, the media specialist, even my library board was extremely excited about offering this because my library board president actually also serves on the school board. So he knew this would be a pretty big deal for students in our district. We did ask for student name, their ID card number and what grade they were. We don't have addresses. And the reason behind that is we deal with the school in regards to overdues. Upon graduation, students can bring in their card, grab, bring in the letter that they receive and we will issue them a full card. That way they can continue this on immediately following their graduation. One of the biggest things is you have to determine a policy and this was a special card type. There were certain regulations that we had to develop so that everybody knew what the rules were. Our policy is located on the link here. I'm gonna quick pull that up so you can see that. Okay, this is our student access card policy. Any middle school or high school student automatically receives one. We communicate with the school when new students come in. If a student leaves the district, we don't typically delete the card. That may become something that we would explore going forward. We have developed this for lower grades and we're working on expanding and rolling it out to the grade school students, the teachers that want to have this in their classroom because in our district, every single student has an iPad. With the digital access, they can get access to overdrive, tumble books, and basically any of those resources that the school doesn't have access to and you need a card to access. The biggest thing we did was allowing a three-item checkout. That seems small, but actually most of our students that use this are perfectly happy with that three-item limit and we have found they are often checking out items for younger brothers and sisters on occasion. They're checking out books for research. They're checking out books to read for pleasure. As far as lost and damaged, we have not actually had any books lost or damaged since the inception of the program back in September and that is something that I'm very proud about because it's always a concern when you might lose items, oh no, and we don't want to create barriers to these students. And we do deliver books to the school. The teachers sometimes email me and say, hey, we need this book. And that is something that's really helped students that may not drive, may not live close to the library here in town or be able to get here. So that was another key component of our policy was the ability to do that. Like I said, the key things that they get out of this is a three-book checkout limit. They can access our computers or internet computers and they get access to all digital resources. Since we started, there's been some usage, not a lot, but when you look at this, you see that, okay, students got to access stuff that they may not have been able to access prior to this. I hope that these numbers will grow. Obviously, February represents only a partial month at this point in time, and you can see our total circulation for the month. We are a pretty small community, so 1600 checkouts for us is pretty good, and that has been growing over the past few months. Finally, this is something that almost any library could implement with cooperation from the school. And we did purchase different-looking library cards so that we know what these look like. My staff knows what they look like. They know they're a student card because we limit the checkouts, obviously, and I haven't had any students need additional items. So- They have a different checkout than your regular patrons. Yes. They have to know that there's a difference, yeah. Yep. So any other questions? Great. All right, so thank you very much, Lori. That was great. We did have a couple of questions that have come in. Okay, but we can do a few of them. And I don't know if you had mentioned this. Do all of the students live in your library district, or how does that- Yes. All students, we contract service for Ierton. So Ierton doesn't have a public library, but they contract with us. They pay us a certain amount each year. So all students within the West Sioux School District live in Haywarden or Ierton or rural Sioux County, which, again, is our service area. Okay. But how many students is that? In the whole district, there's roughly 1,000. We rolled this out initially just to grade six through 12, which is about 4 to 500. Are you gonna expand it to everyone or? Yes, we are working on that. The key thing is we wanted to roll it out to the kids that really could use this, and we are working actively with the grade school teachers rolling it out to the younger grades. So you've been working with the teachers. Is there a school librarian at the school? Well, the kids that are library and librarian there, that you also- Yeah, I've mostly worked with the principals, but the school librarians as well. We do have school librarians in both the elementary and the middle school high school. So we have worked actively with them as well. Okay, great. All right, that's everything then. Thank you very much, Laurie.