Teen Collaboration

Partnering with Chartiers Valley School District

Collaboration within our communities is necessary for libraries to achieve success, and at Bridgeville Public Library, we strive to build multiple partnerships that have a positive impact on our patrons. One of the biggest partnerships that our library engages in is with Chartiers Valley School District.   

Ms. Carrie, our Teen and Youth Services Librarian, works with multiple teachers within the district. One of the ways we partner with them is by holding an annual two-sentence scary story competition with our local eighth-grade students. This competition celebrates their writing by posting the top fifty stories on Bridgeville Public Library’s social media accounts and having the public vote on their favorites. To announce the winner, Ms. Carrie visits the middle school with prizes for the teens who wrote the top twelve highest-voted stories in the competition, and those teens are announced in front of the entire eighth-grade class (and sometimes even the entire school!).

Another initiative we work on with the eighth-grade teachers is to host an Open Mic Night for the students. During this special event, the students are invited to share some of their favorite original works of poetry, created during their first semester of school, with the community, their peers, and their caregivers. The library then displays their poetry throughout the Children and Teen section from the end of January until the end of February.

The library also helps to provide new materials to circulate at Chartiers Valley Middle School’s library throughout the year. This is a special collaborative effort between Bridgeville Public Library, Chartiers Valley Middle School, and Scott Township Library. Every month, both Bridgeville Public Library and Scott Township Library provide a combination of forty to sixty books that Chartiers Valley middle school students can check out with their student ID. These books rotate in and out of the library’s collection so that the students can have fresh books at their fingertips every month.

We are proud of the many ways that we collaborate and celebrate our local students and school district.