Suncrest Elementary librarian receives national honor

Jun. 12—Librarians in elementary school field a lot of questions in the course of the school day.
Suncrest Elementary's nationally known librarian, Charlotte Chung, could write a book, then check it out, as she recounts the queries that have come her way in the course of her career.
"I had a student ask me, 'How do worms poop ?' 'Is infinity a number ?' I love that they immediately think, 'OK, let's ask Miss Chung. She's a librarian.'"
She can tell you all about it when you click on that video produced by the Carnegie Corp. of New York City.
Visit www.carnegie.org for that link. Chung was among 10 librarians across the U.S. recognized with the "For the Love of Librarians " award, sponsored by philanthropic firm and the American Library Association.
Chung was lauded for purchasing books and audiobooks in the native languages of students who attend the diverse school on Collins Ferry Road, by way of grants she secured.
Suncrest Elementary now boasts a multilingual collection of books that Chung says will speak to students there.
She was especially heartened this past school year, she said, by the kindergartener who proclaimed, "This book is for me, " as she showed the audiobook in Spanish to her classmates.
"By providing books in first languages, we as school librarians support the literacy and educational goals of our students, " the librarian said.
By third grade, educators and literacy watchers said, students should be reading to learn after years of learning to read.
Her fellow honorees include a bookmobile librarian in Hawaii who literally delivered the printed word and other informational materials to parents and students displaced by wildfires that ravaged the Maui coast in 2023.
Another high school librarian in Texas was spotlighted for her work with low-income families in her school district.

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'One of the things we have against us is that many of those books have been damaged over time; they are no longer available,' Peraza said. 'We were lucky that the pope's ancestors we found were all concentrated in the same area, that of the Church of the Holy Spirit, and coincidentally, almost everything fell into the same book, which luckily still survives.' The researchers' good fortune continued. Because Diego de Arana Isla wanted to become a knight of the Order of Santiago, a highly prestigious and selective appointment at the time, he underwent a thorough background check that was documented and is available in digital archives from Spain, making it easier for Del Pino to locate his ancestors. Diego became, in fact, a knight of the Order of Santiago in 1678. 'His service record and list of merits depict 40 years of devout service to the crown with multiple military and administrative posts throughout the colonies,' Peraza wrote. He died in Cuba in 1684. Incidentally, Diego's sister Catalina, whose children were born in Venezuela, would become the great-great-grandmother of Antonio José de Sucre, one of Latin America's independence leaders. The Aranas came from Isla, a small village in Cantabria in northern Spain. Diego's father, Diego de Arana Valladar, was born in 1595 and lived an adventurous life as the captain of a galleon in the Spanish Royal Navy, defending Portuguese settlements in the Caribbean and South America from Dutch corsairs, said Marial Iglesias, a Cuban historian and Harvard University researcher who collaborated on the Times story. (Portugal and Spain were united for about 60 years until 1640.) A final mystery As the surnames of the ancestors began to pop up, Iglesias realized that there is a chance the pope's Cuban ancestors might be connected to one of the most iconic places in Havana: La Plaza de la Revolución, or Revolution Square, where Pope Jean Paul II and Pope Francis had held mass during historic trips to the island. The landmark, topped with a massive obelisk and a statue of José Martí, Cuba's independence hero and most famous writer, was built under Fulgencio Batista's government in the 1950s as the 'Civic Plaza' in an elevation known as the Catalans' Hill. But in the past, that spot had a curious name: Loma de Tadino, or Tadino's Hill. 'I haven't had time to find out why it's called Loma de Tadino, but that's a very rare surname. The family lived in Cuba for generations, and it could have been their property,' Iglesias said. 'Imagine if the pope's Italian branch of the family, who moved to Cuba in the 1600s, gave name to the place where the statue of José Martí stands. How about that?'