District Media Services

Each of our nine Hopkins schools has a welcoming, up-to-date, and well-equipped library media center that is staffed by a full-time licensed media specialist and several support staff.

Our media specialists are central to the teaching and learning process in their schools, helping students and staff become effective, efficient, and ethical users and communicators of ideas and information.

District Media Services offers support to our school media programs in several important areas:

Online subscriptions—We provide district-wide subscriptions to excellent online resources for up-to-date information, which all our students can access from school or from home. These include Britannica Online Encyclopedia, CultureGrams, AtomicLearning, BrainPop, and more.
Classroom videos—We house a collection of more than 9,000 outstanding curriculum-related videos, searchable via a web catalog. We also provide all teachers with access to Discovery Education United Streaming, an on-demand, online source for thousands of digital videos, which can be downloaded for classroom use.
Budgeting and ordering assistance—We supply each school media center with a generous annual allocation for updating the book collection and technology equipment. We also provide centralized equipment ordering to keep costs down and ensure consistent standards among buildings.
Policy development and support—We assist the media specialists in interpreting and implementing school district policies in the areas of copyright, appropriate Internet use, and selection and retention of instructional materials.
Staff training—We offer regular opportunities for all our media specialists to participate in online classes or attend professional workshops and conferences to keep their library and technology skills up-to-date.
Other professional support—We work with curriculum leaders and classroom teachers to promote recreational reading and media literacy for students at all levels. Special activities in the schools include book fairs, author visits, book clubs, visits to the local public libraries, and more.
Strategic planning—We are continually implementing and fine-tuning our District Media Strategic Plan.