School Librarian of the YeaR FINALIST

Jennifer Mathews, Colorado School for the Deaf and the Blind (CSDB), Colorado Springs Courtesy of CSDB

Starting a new job always comes with a learning curve, but when Jennifer Mathews moved from her home in Georgia to the foot of the Rocky Mountains to become the library media specialist at the Colorado School for the Deaf and the Blind (CSDB) in Colorado Springs, she had to learn more than just the ins and outs of a new library.

CSDB serves students from preschool through 12th grade, housing multiple schools for students who are deaf or hard of hearing and students who are blind or visually impaired. When she was hired in April 2022, Mathews didn’t read braille or know American Sign Language (ASL). After arriving on campus, she discovered that she faced an even bigger hurdle.

Hired initially as the librarian for blind students, Mathews was surprised to learn that the school for the deaf had recently cut its library position. Mathews’s new principal asked if she would head a combined library for blind and deaf students.

The unexpected challenge didn’t faze Mathews, a finalist for the 2025 School Librarian of the Year Award, presented by SLJ and sponsored by Scholastic. She took on her new duties without hesitation.

Mathews presented exactly the attitude then-principal Jamie Lugo was looking for.

“I remember interviewing her and meeting someone with a lot of creativity and flexibility,” Lugo says. “She has such a calm presence, she’s open-minded, and she saw my vision and was willing to support the school in any way she could.”

At the time, there wasn’t even a library space to reimagine, since Lugo had closed the old one to create an extra classroom to accommodate a growing population of students with more complex needs. So Mathews started from scratch. Working with her facilities team and contractors, she helped plan and design a new, unified 3,750-square-foot library in what was previously a cafeteria.

“It was pretty amazing what she did,” Lugo says. “There was a team that helped initially, but she did the work. She handled it beautifully, with so much grace.”

That work included hand cataloging the entire, newly combined collection—nearly 9,000 items in all.

“I chose to put every book in the system myself, instead of having it downloaded, because it helped me get to know what we had and get to know the items available, and it helped me realize how old our collection was,” Mathews says.

Indeed, the books were nearly 30 years old on average. Mathews set to work weeding the collection while learning, on the fly, the nuances of creating a library for blind and deaf students. For instance, she learned that there are actually two different versions of braille: uncontracted—in which each letter and word is spelled out exactly as it is in standard print—and contracted, a shorthand version that uses special signs to fill in common words and letters and thus allows for shorter books. This was important because uncontracted books take up much more space on the shelves. (For context, the first book in the “Harry Potter” series runs about six volumes in uncontracted braille.)

She also had to rethink the library’s layout for her blind students.

“You can’t have little displays or tables here and there, because that’s stuff that’s easy to trip over,” Mathews says. “You have to think about the flow and how best to keep it, because you don’t want to change the layout all the time.”

For her deaf students, Mathews learned another important distinction.

“You have to take into account that for deaf students, English isn’t their first language,” Mathews says. “ASL is, which is a very visual language.” That’s meant expanding the graphic novels available for her deaf students, a choice that’s proved extremely popular.

Mathews ensures that all her students can enjoy books, whatever their needs. During story times, she often includes a sound or tactile component for her blind students, and for her deaf students, an ASL interpreter signs while Mathews reads.

She finds ways to communicate with the kids (like typing questions and answers on a screen with her deaf students), but Mathews has taken it a step further by learning ASL and braille herself. Although she is by no means fluent, her immersion into the languages of her students has helped to build stronger relationships. She can even help her blind students with their braille schoolwork.

Representation

All told, it has been a lot of work for a solo librarian with no support staff, but Mathews has not let that deter her. She’s made the most of her budget, which includes $4,500 from the Colorado State Library and $1,750 from the federal Library Services and Technology Act, as well as more than $2,000 from CSDB for library software and various supplies.

That budget has gone toward expanding and modernizing the CSDB library, especially with stories that feature deaf or blind characters.

“The whole books as windows and mirrors, my students really want to learn about people like them,” Mathews says. “It’s been a mission to find books with deaf or blind characters so they can see themselves in the books.”

Last fall, Mathews hosted deaf author Karlie Waldrip to visit students and speak about her book I Deaf-initely Can, based on the true story of Rhett, a deaf Australian cattle dog.

One of the latest, and most successful, new additions to Mathews’s collection has been talking books.

These titles, from publishers like Vox and Wonderbooks, help both her student populations, offering print for her deaf students and an audio component for her blind students. They’re especially helpful for her blind elementary students, who can’t read standard print and are just starting to learn braille.

“It’s made a real difference for those students. Before they would come and get story time, but they weren’t interested in books, because it didn’t mean much to them,” Mathews says. Using talking books, students can interact with reading in a deeper way, following along and turning the pages thanks to an audio alert.

All Mathews’s efforts have gone into creating the kind of library that students can’t wait to enter.

“Her rapport with students has been pretty instant, and they really respect her and enjoy being around her,” Lugo says. “She’s made the library a safe and welcoming space.”

For Mathews, a big part of her librarianship is making sure her students have resources available to them in school and at home. That’s why she’s cultivated partnerships with both the Colorado Talking Book Library—which provides free resources, including audio, braille, and large-print books, to people of any age with vision loss—and the Pikes Peak Public Library District, to make sure students understand the resources available to them so they can continue their reading success outside school.

“It’s all just about trying to get students prepared for life and to be as independent as they can be,” Mathews says.

Despite the everyday obstacles they face, her students “are just so fun. They have a challenging life, and all these different things they have to overcome that most people take for granted, and they just have the best outlook on everything,” Mathews says. “They are just these amazing kids.”
 

Freelance education reporter Andrew Bauld writes frequently for SLJ .