Juggling myriad duties every day, we are all eminently skilled school library ringmasters. We fill our resumes with information literacy, collection development, programming, technological skills, digital citizenship, advocacy, and more. However, there are probably a few library, uh, “happenings” that won’t ever make those magisterial lists, but for better or worse, stick to our memories more effectively than any lesson in how to install Papercut (again)! Many thanks to all the librarians who took the time to share their library shenanigans and photos with me, and had me giggle-snorting at my desk while 5^th graders gave me confused looks (I could just see them wondering, “Do all librarians act like this?” Yes. Yes we do.).

I’ve organized the episodes into the following categories: objects, wildlife, facilities, and students student-ing. Because the last is the most fruitful category, and because I have such a wealth of material to share, I’m dividing the post into two parts. Today I’ll cover objects, wildlife, and facilities, and next week we’ll bring on the student hijinks!

Objects

We’ve all found items in the library that left us bemused for some reason. There’s the mini crockpot Emily Auerswald (Greenwich Country Day, CT) found, or the dragonfly (see photo above) and whole roast chicken that Christina Pommer’s (St. Stephen’s, FL) students left in the back office to collect later, or the tupperware of lasagna Tara Peace (La Jolla Country Day, CA) found hidden in the shelves (fortunately not yet moldy!). Whitney Etchison (Severn School, MD) “freaked out a little” when she arrived at the library one morning, “turned on the lights, and found two CPR dummies behind the front desk”—which she didn’t at first realize were dummies, hence the minor freak out! “Still the weirdest thing I’ve found left behind the desk,” she says.

Jo Melinson (Sacramento Country Day) had some fun with unexpected items in her library. “For my 60th birthday last spring,” she says, “our Lower School Librarian and her 2nd grade daughter hid 60 tiny glass whales throughout the library for me to find. I found the most creative one this fall hidden in the hand soap container (we had to use up the soap for it to become visible!)”

Overlake’s lost and found boxes always overflow with endless heaps of clothes, though I don’t think we have it as bad as Alyssa Mandel at The Out-of-Door Academy (FL) where it “is evidently a cultural practice”! She reports finding “a LOT of clothes in here. Like whole outfits—pants, shirts, hoodies, sneakers.” Sometimes accessories join the mix as well: “Necklaces and bracelets, hair clips, even grooming tools like straightening irons and hair brushes.” We’re all familiar with the “forest of water bottles” and other forgotten items that merrily populate our campuses, but Alyssa “can’t fathom how someone changes into an outfit they presumably brought in a bag or backpack and then just ditches the clothes they came in. Also, we have bathrooms and lockers, but this is the library—where is all this changing taking place?!” As someone who frequently walks into the library bathroom at 3:00PM and finds hordes of girls changing into athletic gear, I sympathize!

If you are a lower school librarian, you have likely run into some shenanigans involving lost teeth. Says Kristen Oeth (Columbus Academy, OH), “I had two first graders in two different classes lose a tooth on the same day. The resulting declarations (mid-story, of course) got the class quite off track. Although lightning is not supposed to strike twice, evidently chaos can!”

However, Julie Rick sees that story, and raises the stakes! Says she: “At a former school where I was a librarian, I once found a child’s tooth on the library carpet—right in the spot where students regularly sat for story time. Naturally, I assumed it had fallen out of someone’s pocket, so I checked with all the teachers to see if anyone had recently lost a tooth. No one claimed it. Case closed? Absolutely not. Over the course of that school year, I found FOUR MORE TEETH on the library floor. Five mystery teeth. Zero witnesses. Zero suspects. Zero explanations. I can only assume there was a highly organized Tooth Fairy operation happening in my library, and I was the last person to know.” (Can I just say, this makes me very glad not to work in a lower school!)

For object-related shenanigans in the library, though, I think no one can beat Brian Collier’s (Marist, GA) “Finding Nemo” adventure! Says he: “Student Council uses an office in the library to prep their promo materials for games and pep rallies. We’re mainly talking large banners but sometimes there’s the odd palm tree or fairytale castle. One year there were remote-controlled fish blimps that the students inflated with helium in the office. They were floating around peacefully, occasionally bumping against the 8-foot ceiling but generally behaving themselves…until one of the boys decided to fly a clownfish dubbed Nemo out into the library. (Note: our library has a three-story atrium topped with a barrel vault ceiling.)

“Nemo, released from the office confines, slowly swam skyward amidst shouts of “grab him!” Too late. He was out of arm’s reach and, despite every attempt to “fly” him back down, he decided to nestle into the top of the barrel vault. Nemo remained there until a groundskeeper and a few coaches came in the next morning carrying a half mile long extendable pole with a bouquet of duct tape (sticky side out) tied to the tip. They took turns leaning off the bridge trying to catch Nemo. It honestly looked like they were deep-sea fishing—leaning over the railing with this giant pole, eventually with a giant clownfish stuck on the end.” Mic drop!

Wildlife

As the Overlake library has no AC, we always prop the doors open when it’s warm or hot outside. That invites frequent visitations by birds, so many that we started putting up bird tape and bought a bird net! The worst are the hummingbirds that fly up 20 feet to our clerestory windows, out of net reach. We also find the occasional newt or salamander navigating the carpet, and we assist them back to the wild.

Fortunately for Overlake, the squirrels that sometimes steal candy from the Upper School principal’s office have only faked us out by darting in and out, but Christina Pommer (St. Stephen’s, FL) was not so lucky. She once returned from winter break “to find three baby squirrels, one at a time, one morning in the library and enlisted several intrepid faculty members to collect and distribute outside!” Margaret Wadley (McCallie, TN) also reported some high-energy squirrel hijinks! She says: “Years ago, a squirrel got into the Library (I think through the air vents) and took hours to remove because it kept hiding behind books on the shelf. I had to get all students to leave and had multiple teachers and school staff helping. My principal came in with a wire trash can over his head and a yardstick to push books back and try to get the squirrel out where we could catch it! Finally, I think the squirrel got tired and a teacher was able to catch it in the wire trash can with a book over the top, and we released the poor thing outside. The whole day was like that scene from Christmas Vacation, screaming included!”

Brian Collier (Marist, GA), whose library is surrounded by trees with a creek nearby, also had a squirrel visitation. The critter “decided to move into our drop ceiling. We tried trapping it, but it was too smart, so Zach, the youngest member of our maintenance team, decided to evict the squirrel himself. He isolated the little guy in an office and there was a crowd of students and faculty watching through the window like it was a World Wrestling event. Zach sort of stood in the middle while the squirrel parkoured all over the place. Zach eventually decided to take off his sweatshirt to use like a net. (There was a certain amount of swoony expectation when he started lifting his shirt, but he had a t-shirt underneath, so everything remained G-rated.) The battle ended pretty quickly after that, and the squirrel was released back into the wild.”

In terms of other natural world visitors, Suzanne Fox (Roland Park) reports that one winter, their library had mice! “A mouse walked across a study room desk. There may have been some screaming.” Hearing that, Laura Hooper (St. George’s, RI) might be glad that one day, “a neighborhood outdoor cat was hanging out by the [library] entrance. A student noticed from a distance and generously ran up the library steps to let the cat into the library (no, it was not Dewey)!” Rena Popelka (Columbus Academy, GA) might also want some feline support for the bat in her library! “It was just down the hall from me, hanging on the back of a carrell. Maintenance came and removed it outside where it promptly flew off.” 

Allison Peters (Colorado Academy, CO) has had multiple univited animal guests. She reports: “Several years ago while doing a biography lesson in our cozy corner a second grader raised her hand. I called on her and she said ‘Ms. Allison, there’s a snake right there,’ and pointed to a garter snake curled up under the baseboard heater. The students were a lot calmer than me! They were practical and ran to get our science teacher while I ran away in a panic. I don’t like snakes. A few years after that I was sitting in a circle with a first grade class in the same cozy corner when a student raised her hand and said ‘Ms. Allison, there is an animal sitting next to me.’ And it was true! A vole had literally joined our circle. Of course, we all scooted away and two clever and calm first graders went to get the same science teacher. The snake and the vole were kept for the day in the science classroom and then released back to the wild after school. We think they entered through the side door when Operations was delivering furniture and doing work in the library.”

Moving away from mammals and birds, Martha Kennedy’s (Concord Academy, MA) library had an involuntary insect infestation! She says: “Early in my career, a student came to me and said ‘There are insects in the other room.’ I immediately thought ants, but when I pulled out a chair and looked under the carrel desktop, I saw dozens of large crickets and a cardboard package that looked like an 18 count egg carton! I quickly went to my neighbors in the science wing for a large vessel and a willing volunteer to help me collect them. The student was not keen on the day’s dissection, but was fine with coralling the critters into a glass container. We captured as many as we could and took them outside where they scattered and possibly fed the geese who frequented the soccer pitch. Decades have passed and no one ever fessed up nor divulged a single peep about how and why these crickets were in the library. The crickets we didn’t capture, however, lived on for months having made their way down two floors to a computer lab. They drove our tech guy nuts.”

Megan Glidden (Albuquerque Academy, NM), however, takes the cake with her arachnid volunteer! “Just last week, some students came into my office to let me know they had found a “big bug” in the back of the library. I went back to investigate and found they had used one of our bowl-shaped desk light shades to contain the bug. It was, in fact, an angry 4-inch vinegaroon. It was waving its tail and spraying its vinegar smell. We slid some poster board and cardboard underneath and transported it outside. Just another day in the life of a librarian.” Even looking a picture of that critter makes me glad not to live in New Mexico!

Public Domain Image

Facilities

Sometimes, librarians are the cause of the chaos! Says Jo Melinson (Sacramento Country Day, CA), “Every year the librarians take a day at the beginning of March to turn the library into a reading (only) room. We build a reading fort for classes to reserve and move all the tables and chairs aside to make room for bean bag chairs, pillows, and beach chairs. Then we serve tea and hot chocolate to all our cozy readers.”

Once again, though, Brian Collier (Marist, GA) takes the library shenanigans cake, when his library turned into “The Library Rainforest! We found a wet patch on the carpet one morning. The library roof is prone to leaking, but it hadn’t been raining for a while, so I got out my spyglass (did I mention that our library has a three-story atrium topped with a barrel vault ceiling) to see if I could spot where the water was coming from. Oh, my. The fire sprinkler was leaking. It was just sort of dripping a little, but I had nightmare visions of the whole system suddenly opening up and flooding the place.

“Did you know: there are only a handful of sprinkler repair companies in the state of Georgia! It took them a while to get to us and when they arrived they didn’t have a ladder long enough to reach the sprinkler. So, we had to wait while they found a lift tall enough to reach but narrow enough to fit through the door. Did you know: most lift rental outfits have tall lifts and narrow lifts but not tall AND narrow lifts?

“While they were hunting this unicorn lift the leak got to the point that it was actually spraying out in a fine mist. When the morning sun came in through the upper windows you could see rainbows in the air. Students said it was like an indoor rainforest. Despite the yellow ‘Do not cross’ tape we put out, students kept trying to walk through it…until they realized it smelled like sewage. Eventually the repair guys came back with a majestically tall lift…that still didn’t reach! Fortunately one of them must secretly be Spider-Man because he clambered out onto the safety rail and stretched up to where he could reach the spray head and swap it for a new one. I kind of miss the rainbows, but not the smell.”

I swear, sometimes it seems as if we need hazard pay every time we set foot in our libraries! And we haven’t even gotten to the students! Stay tuned next week for yet more monkeyshines…