Dear Trottier Community:
This year, the Trottier Library is partnering with caregivers in order to foster an engagement with their children’s reading choices. Caregivers play a crucial role in their children’s growth and development, including being aware of what content their children have access to and supporting them in engaging with that content.
Curating a middle school library is a key responsibility of the school librarian and involves considering the wide age range and maturity levels of students. The librarian uses the School Committee policy,
Selection Policy for Books and Materials, to guide the selection process. As a school, we strive to keep our collections current and engaging and include Young Adult (YA) titles in the collection. This requires careful navigation of publisher classifications, reviews, and content warnings to ensure they align with our students’ developmental stages. Our learning goals for students include fostering a love for literature, enhancing critical thinking, and promoting lifelong learning. Diverse books, including YA literature, are highly relevant and engaging for students.
The Young Adult classification is generally used to label literature for ages eleven to eighteen. The American Library Association Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) doesn't provide a specific, formal definition of YA books. Still, it offers guidelines and best practices for selecting and promoting YA literature. Given the wide range of content labeled as YA, Trottier is providing caregivers with options for students to access the YA collections. Through these options, we aim to empower caregivers to be involved in students’ decisions about content that they access from the school library.
The District wants to help support all students in their reading selections, and, for this reason, the following guidelines have been established:
Caregiver of a Sixth Grader* can:
1. Opt the student into borrowing from the YA collection.
2. Require caregiver permission to borrow a specific book from the YA collection.
* Sixth-grade students whose caregivers do not select #1 or #2 will not be able to borrow from the YA collection.
Caregiver of a Seventh or Eighth Grader* can:
1. Opt the student out of borrowing from the YA collection.
2. Require caregiver permission to borrow a specific book from the YA collection.
*Seventh and eighth-grade students whose caregivers do not select #1 or #2 will be able to borrow from the YA collection.
If you are the caregiver of a 6th-grade student and you would like your student to have access to the YA collection, or if you are the caregiver of a 7th or 8th-grade student and you would like to limit your student’s access to the YA collection, then please complete the following
YA Literature Form 25 to indicate your preference. Please complete this form for each child per grade level.
We will make every effort to ensure students adhere to caregiver preferences communicated through the opt-in/
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