If you checked out a book at the library recently, you may have noticed a new face there—Ms. Piscionere, the new librarian at our school. Hired this school year to replace Ms. Smoot, the previous librarian, Ms. Piscionere—whose name is pronounced “Pish-ee-en-AAR-ee”—expresses a readiness to be the librarian and a desire to change the way the library works.
Ms. Piscionere was born in New York City to an Italian father and a Portuguese mother, but grew up in San Francisco after her family moved there. While you might assume she’s spent her whole career in education, she originally got an undergraduate degree in film studies from UC Santa Barbara, and spent a few years as a cook in a brewery. She spent seven years as a librarian in a private school, but she knew she wanted to become a public school librarian. “My mother was a children’s librarian,” she recounts, sitting down at a desk in the library, “and I just grew up in libraries … and I thought it would be fun to work in a school library.” So she went back to school at Buffalo University to get a masters degree in library and information sciences.
Soon after obtaining her masters, Ms. Piscionere joined SCUSD as the librarian at Peterson Middle School. After ten years, she retired from that job and became a Teacher on Special Assignment (TOSA) Librarian for the district, a job where “you lead the Professional Development Days” for teachers, as Ms. Piscionere explains. While she was a TOSA, she ordered all the books for Huerta and Agnew schools when they opened up.
After her time as a TOSA, she became the librarian at Huerta Middle School for four years, before finally getting hired at Wilcox. “I always wanted to come here,” she explains. “I just wanted to work in high school after working in middle school for so long.” She says that her time at Wilcox so far is “fantastic,” as “the staff is wonderful, the kids are great.”
She also expresses a desire to improve the library’s facilities. “I really wanna make this more of an exciting hub for kids to come and hang out and enjoy being here,” she says. To further this end, she wants to “take out all these tall shelves,” pointing to some on the east side of the library, and also wishes to clear out some rooms in the library to make “breakout room[s],” or ones to “use for Teen Read Week” and other programs. Students echo similar sentiments: Aaron Palomino, a sophomore, says he wants to see “clubs in the library.” Annika Mauldin wants the library to be “more of a lively place,” saying, “I know it’s supposed to be a quiet place for homework, but I feel like it could be more welcoming, and less of that doctor’s office waiting room feel.”
Ms. Piscionere appreciates the genres of romance and thrillers, but her favorite is dystopian, noting that, “a lot of times you get all three [genres] in dystopian.” Her favorite book, though, is J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. She also appreciates the rise of Young Adult fiction. “When I was a kid, there was no Young Adult fiction,” she reveals. “Now it’s a huge genre.” When asked if she believes that kids in the modern generation read less despite having more books available, Ms. Piscionere takes a different stance. “I think kids still check out a lot of books,” she reports, arguing that students’ schoolwork, not a lack of interest in reading, is why some students might not read that much. She remarks that “When I was in college, I loved reading,” however, “I didn’t read at all in college, because you can’t. You have so much that you have to read for classes, you don’t have time.”
Outside of school, she enjoys golfing and traveling around the country, having been to 47 states. Although she has only been at the school for a few months so far, some are already impacted by her actions. Mauldin recalls how she saw Ms. Piscionere “doing a presentation with the class that seemed really good about how to check out books,” referring to a different class that she observed during first period. She is currently reading The Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson, but she is “totally open” to any book recommendations kids have for her, as she is “trying to breathe some new life into the library.”
