Seneca High School’s librarian named head of association

Seneca High School librarian Amy Rominiecki has been named president of the New Jersey Association of School Librarians (NJASL).

“I’m very excited and honored,” Rominiecki, now in her eighth year at Seneca, said. “It is a huge responsibility to be the leader of more than 700 school librarians in the state of New Jersey.”

She was already on the NJASL board when the nomination committee asked her to run for the position once it opened.

“I am scared, also, because it’s a huge job, but I’m very confident that I’ll do a good job,” Rominiecki said.

She discussed a recent Rutgers University study on the effectiveness of school libraries on student achievement and said she will have to get the word out about the study as part of her new role.

“That’s going to be a huge component of what I’ll be working on,” Rominiecki said.

A challenge will be to work in different capacities with state legislators.

“Of course, New Jersey legislators have a lot on their plate right now — and the voice of school librarians has been pretty small,” she said. “We try as hard as we can to get our voice heard.”

Rominiecki is looking forward to attending national and state conferences and learning best practices from other librarians and bringing that back to Seneca.

Once upon a time, the librarian had thought about being a classroom teacher.

“I have so many different interests that when I learned what a librarian does, which is work with all different subject matters, all different teachers, that really appealed to me (as well as) learning all the different topics and working with students to investigate what they’re interested in,” Rominiecki said.

Rominiecki said when she first started at Seneca, the library had 1,200 books and now, there are 12,000.

She said a “huge change” in libraries since she was young is the advent of computers. Part of her job now is to help students find accurate information using online search engines. Rominiecki said she stays on top of it all by attending professional development programs.

“We’ve really tried to make the library the community center of the school,” she said. “We have hundreds of kids here every period and I think that that’s been a huge change for many people to see the library not just a quiet place but somewhere where there’s a lot of life going on.”

Some students even eat lunch in the library.

“We want every kid to feel comfortable and safe,” Rominiecki said, noting some kids intimidated by the lunch room while others want to socialize.