The Husky Huddle

Inside Olean High’s Library with Brionna Howard: How “Book Tastings” Lit a Spark and Quadrupled Checkouts

• Genelle Morris

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A quiet library turned into a buzzing café of curiosity—and it changed how students read. We sit down with Olean High School librarian Brianna Howard to unpack the “book tasting” that quadrupled circulation in a month, the power of visible mentorship, and the small choices that make reading feel irresistible instead of required. Starting as a social studies teacher and now in her second year as librarian, Brianna blends data, design, and heart to build a space where students explore freely. She walks us through eight high-interest genres, the simple menu system that invites quick sampling, and the classroom partnerships that keep momentum going.

We zoom out to the bigger literacy picture: why foundational reading skills and digital literacy matter in an information-saturated world, and how students learn to evaluate sources, navigate online feeds, and make sense of complex media. Brianna shares how a countywide network of school librarians swaps ideas each quarter, how a neighboring district sparked the tasting concept, and why adapting ideas to your own community is the secret to success. Along the way, we talk genre surprises, Stephen King devotees, and the staff reading wall that turns hallway chats into book recommendations students actually follow.

Mentors matter. When teachers and families talk about what they’re reading—paperbacks, audiobooks, memoirs like Matthew McConaughey’s Greenlights—students see reading as a living habit. Brianna offers a timely book recommendation, Mel Robbins’s Let Them Theory, and explains how it reshaped her approach to daily interactions: suggest and support, then let readers choose. We close with a look ahead at new collaborations, family engagement ideas, and the ongoing goal: more students finding books they didn’t expect to love. If you care about school libraries, student choice, and practical literacy strategies you can use tomorrow, this one’s for you. Subscribe, share with a colleague, and leave a quick review telling us the last book you couldn’t put down.

SPEAKER_00:

So, welcome everybody to our first episode of the Husky Huddle for the school year. We are so excited to get this up and running again. And I can't wait to interview lots of people in Oleanne City School District and ask them about everything that they're doing and share that with everyone out there who really wants to learn about our district and things that we do here. So, our very, very first podcast guest is Brianna Howard, who is our esteemed librarian here at the high school. And we are just going to have a great conversation about literacy and libraries and all those awesome things. And so I'm going to begin by asking Brianna to tell us a little bit about herself and why and how she got to Oleanne High School here with us.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, so I am Brianna Howard, and um I started my career with Olean actually as a seventh-grade social studies teacher. And I did that for a few years and I loved it. Um, and I got my master's degree in library science. And it just so happened the year I graduated that a position came open here at the high school. So it worked out great. And um, so I've been in this position now. This is my second year, and it's been just so much fun. It's a delight to get to meld my love of history when I have those history nerds in the library and just general literacy because I do love to read. So that's a great, I mean, it's just fantastic.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, that's wonderful, and it's a beautiful space up there. So I love going in the library and going in all libraries, but particularly autos. Our library is just an awesome space for sure. It's great, it supports literacy and funny enough. September uh was National Literacy Month, and we just celebrated International Literacy Day. So, do you have any opinion about why these literacy celebrations are important for our district and our students? And how do you celebrate these things?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I mean, I think literacy is really the cornerstone of everything we do with education. And it's just so important to get a good strong foundation there before we try to build on to all these extra things. And with all of the information that people are getting inundated with every day, all the time, it's so important to know how to sift through it. And there's literacy skills that go beyond just reading, but like digital literacy and every other piece of that. And so I'm really proud of our district in that we we start from elementary. The elementary schools have these awesome programs where they bring in um families, they have reading nights, they have all this fun stuff, and then we continue that. And Karen Fox does a great job at the middle school. She has an awesome program with the kids. And uh so I just hope to continue that with the high school. So up here this month, we've done a lot with the um, especially with the younger grades, and we've done like book tastings, trying to get students interested in doing independent reading. And the English teachers have been super on board, and it's been really great to see that our numbers have increased dramatically from years past. Um, so my most recent numbers now compared to last year, where I had about, you know, like less than 100 checkouts, we'll just say. This year we have as of today over 450.

unknown:

Wow.

SPEAKER_01:

So the numbers just keep skyrocketing, and that's great.

SPEAKER_00:

Only a month. Yes, yeah, yeah. And that's all supporting that effort. So thank you. That's great. All right, so um, we heard about the Olean High School book tasting event, and that's led to this increase in the checkouts. So tell us more about this event and why do you think it was so successful?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so basically what I did is I looked at data from past years and I figured out which genres students are most likely to check out. And then I so I I pulled out, I think I had eight total, and their ones uh it was a kind of a healthy mixture. Of course, you've got your romance in there. Um, graphic novels are very popular right now, so that that was one. Um, but we've also got you know, fantasy, we have sports, um also very popular right now is like horror or thriller type of books. Not really my jam, but I know a lot of kids really like them.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, Brian and I share our similar taste in the horror zone. Yeah, I've read every single Stephen King.

SPEAKER_01:

Have you? Yes. Well, then you could certainly talk to some students about some Stephen King because we have some serious Stephen King fans in this building. Yes.

SPEAKER_00:

One day I want to go to Maine, and I don't want to sidetrack too much, but he also has a Corgi. So I feel like if I bring my Corgi and he's out with his Corgi, those corgiers are gonna see each other and they're gonna fall in love. His Corgi's name is Molly, and my Corgi's name is Nutmeg, and they're just gonna get immediately bonded. It's perfect.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I see it. I see it now.

SPEAKER_00:

See it. All right, so you found these genres.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, and everybody was like, What happened? Okay, so I set up the library to look like a little restaurant, and then I had students come in, they had a menu, and on their menu they had to give these books ratings. So on every table, there was probably, I don't know, 10 books or so in that genre, um, based on again what was most popular in years past. And then the kids would just pick up a random book and decide if they liked it or not, or if they wanted to read it maybe or not. And they spent a few minutes at every table. And then by the end, almost every student checked out a book.

SPEAKER_00:

Wow.

SPEAKER_01:

Which was really cool. And to me, it was like I heard so many conversations of I don't normally like this kind of book, but this sounded really interesting. And so that was that was really cool. And I'm like, see, you never know, you just gotta give it a chance.

SPEAKER_00:

Give it a try. That's awesome. So the cool thing about that is when they have that experience, they're able to, you know, maybe somebody who's always reading only Stephen King. Is there some other authors within the genre that you might want to explore too? Or maybe there's a completely different genre that I never even thought I would enjoy, but here was an opportunity to be exposed. That's great. Yeah, for sure. Um, yeah. So um do you know if any of the other schools are doing something similar, or do you think that's unique to hear?

SPEAKER_01:

So I think that's unique to hear, but I like I mentioned earlier, I know that the other schools all have different fun events that they do, especially the elementary levels with the families in particular. I'm hoping to do some more um events where I can bring in families, but I still have to kind of work on how that's gonna work logistically. Um, but they they've even done fun things before where they have um staff members that dress up in costumes, and then you have the kids like guess who the reader is. And those are fun. They they they love life. It's like the mass singer, except with reading. So the voice.

SPEAKER_00:

So that's really fun. Yeah. So that's really cool. That's that's another way to engage people. So do you ever collaborate with the other librarians to come up with these ideas, or is this something that you were just thinking, this would be a great idea to do here?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so um actually all of the librarians, school librarians in Cataragas County, we get together once a quarter.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, awesome.

SPEAKER_01:

And uh we trade ideas and we share things. And the Hensdale librarian gave me this idea last year. And she did something kind of similar with hers. I just tweaked it a little bit that I felt like it would fit my kids better. But it it's a really great opportunity because there's some great minds out there. So it's it's cool to get to share, you know, what you've been working on and ideas for other schools.

SPEAKER_00:

So that's awesome. That's awesome. And another event that I know that you've been supporting is asking our staff in the building to share what books we're reading. Yes. So how did you come up with that and how has it been working in the building?

SPEAKER_01:

That one I actually I had just been reading, uh, came across I probably on Facebook or something, some sort of research study and stuff. And it was talking about um students or when younger people notice that people they consider to be mentors do something, they tend to also do it. And I thought, well, that's seems especially fitting for reading because we all read things. It's just that the students don't realize, like, hey, we still read, even though we're not in school anymore, you know? And I've seen that play out this year, even in the hallways. I'll hear staff members talking to a kid. They're like, oh, you're reading that book. I read that like a couple of years ago. It was so good. Um, and they give each other recommendations now and they're having these conversations, which is wonderful. It's an awesome place to start from. And hopefully we'll continue to encourage um more students to read more books.

SPEAKER_00:

I really enjoy walking around too and seeing some of the people are are uh putting up that they're reading. There was a book by I think it was Matthew McConaughey that someone posted down. Oh, yeah. He's got a couple good ones, and that was such a surprise to me. Yeah, and I have a whole bunch of audible uh credits, so I like to do audible books, and then I looked his name up and I was like, I know this man wrote books too. He does, he was pretty cool. So now I'm gonna explore them after I do my next rotation books.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, he's got a good one called Green Lights. Green lights, yeah. I read that one last year. It's really good.

SPEAKER_00:

That's great to know. I had no idea until I walked down that hall and saw that on the on the wall. That's hilarious. All right, so are there any upcoming school based events that you want anybody to know about that are related to libraries or literacy that you want people to hear something about so they can get excited and participate with you? Or do you just want to generally encourage everybody to continue to embrace their love of reading, or do you want to do well?

SPEAKER_01:

I definitely want to encourage people to just embrace their love of reading. And um honestly, that whole mentorship thing, it goes back to even parents at home. So I would definitely encourage folks at home, uh, guardians, to start reading books or talking to the kid about, you know, hey, I'm I read this book the other day, it was really good, or what are you reading lately, or things like that, even just those small conversations can have a big impact on kids because they might not know that you know you like Matthew McConaughey's books until you talk to them about it.

SPEAKER_00:

So we didn't know. Yeah, it's great. Okay, thank you. And so um, finally, what's one book you've read recently that you would recommend to our listeners?

SPEAKER_01:

Oh man, there's so many good ones out there. Um one of my favorites that I read this year was the Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins. Yeah, that was really good. That was impactful for me because I felt like after I read that book, I re-examined all of the conversations that I had recently or events in my life. And uh I think it also helps just as an educator because you know you interact with people every day. That's my job. And and so it it helped me um figure out how to best approach certain situations, I guess I'd say.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yeah. No, I've heard such good things about that. A really good friend of mine who just retired as a superintendent. She told me, because I have this long cue of books reading, and she said, You've gotta add that. That's a really good thing. It's fantastic. So worth the reading. Worth the reading here. I'm definitely adding them. Plus, I want to read all of the Da Vinci Coke series again, you know, because they just came out with another book, but I was like, I forgot what happened before. So now you gotta restart. I've got to restart. So get all these books, but I'm really gonna add that to my list at all for sure, Jason. Thank you so much. All right, is there anything else you want to make sure that our listeners know before we sign off?

SPEAKER_01:

Um, I would just say, you know, uh keep encouraging your readers, and I'm excited for this year. I have tons and tons of collaborations planned with teachers. We're gonna do a lot of fun stuff this year, and uh, I hope that that reflects again in increased circulation numbers and more kids finding surprising things they like to read.

SPEAKER_00:

So thank you so much, Brianna, for coming on the Husky Huddle. And I'm so happy that I got you as our very first husky huddler of the year. So thank you so much, and I look forward to having you on again. Oh, thank you. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Thank you.