By Mandy Decker Hoopla IDEA Squad Member | Outreach Coordinator, Jersey City Free Public Library
Libraries don’t just wait for patrons to walk through the door. Some of our most meaningful work happens when we walk out of it, into preschool classrooms, parent workshops, and school gymnasiums, bringing our resources with us.
At Jersey City Free Public Library, the largest municipal library system in New Jersey, we’ve built two outreach partnerships, one with Head Start and one with our local public schools. These partnerships allow us to show how Hoopla content can travel well beyond our 13 branches and two bookmobiles.
Meeting Families Where They Are: Our Head Start Partnership
Every year at the start of the school year, my colleagues and I visit our local Head Start programs for Back-to-School nights and parent workshops. We talk with families about the resources available to them, and one collection I always highlight is the Tiny Tales BingePass.
Head Start serves preschoolers, so a lot of parents aren’t sure whether they should read with a child who isn’t reading yet. Jersey City also has a large immigrant population, which means many of the families we serve don’t read English, and some don’t even speak it. Tiny Tales was built for exactly this moment: one checkout gives a family a full week of access to every title in the collection, removing the pressure of finishing a single book before it’s due back.
A Collection Designed for Bilingual Families
The Tiny Tales BingePass is fantastic because it includes several titles offered in multiple languages and multiple formats. One title in the collection, Little Dumplings, is available as both an eBook and a read-along, in English and in Spanish. That pairing does a lot of work:
- Spanish-speaking families can view the English and Spanish versions side by side and start connecting words across languages.
- The read-along highlights each word in color as it’s spoken, so kids and parents can follow together at their own pace.
- Parents who aren’t confident English readers can still participate fully alongside their child.
I think often about one mother we helped get Hoopla set up on her phone; she used the read-alongs and ABC Mouse with her preschooler to build her own English skills. Today, she works full time, her child graduated from Head Start and moved on to kindergarten, and their family is thriving. That’s what’s possible when library resources meet families exactly where they are.
Building Bridges with Public Schools Through Poetry
Our outreach doesn’t stop with early childhood programs. Every spring, we partner with our public schools around April’s Poetry Month, using the All Voices, All Poetry BingePass to support what teachers are already building into their curriculum.
That partnership starts long before April. My colleagues and I connect with school supervisors and are invited to present during teacher in-service days, introducing educators to BingePasses they can fold directly into classroom lessons. Those relationships come to life each spring at what Jersey City calls the Wordsworth Poetry Event.
Students selected from each of our high schools gather at the local community college, where the art gallery transforms into a poetry festival for several days. We bring physical poetry collections in multiple languages, Spanish being our largest, along with Hindi and Arabic, and set up devices loaded with the All Voices, All Poetry BingePass so students have even more inspiration to draw from as they write.
Throughout the event, students explore several different poetry forms, including:
- Concrete poems, shaped like the subject they’re describing
- Leaf poems, written and hung on a large “poet tree” installation
- Poems inspired directly by the multilingual collection and BingePass materials on hand
We display the poet trees and finished concrete poems back at our library branches afterward, giving families and neighbors a chance to see what the students created.
More Than a Checkout
Both of these partnerships, one with a preschool program and one with our public schools, show how Hoopla content becomes something bigger than a checkout. It’s a bridge into new communities, a tool that helps a parent learn English alongside her child, and a resource that gives teachers one more way to bring poetry to life in the classroom.
If you’re looking for ways to build similar partnerships in your own community, I’d love to compare notes. Please feel free to each out anytime!
