Your Classroom Library and 20%

I was at Sunday morning #CoffeeEduNJ this weekend when my friend Denise (@smilingteach) shared the following quote:

"If you're not losing 20% of your classroom library each year, you don't  have the right books."

Do you ever just hear something that resonates with you? Something of an "aha moment" that makes you think you've been doing it wrong all these years? Well, that quote did just that for me.

It sounds trivial, but really struck a cord with me. I have not been able to find the original person who said this, so for now I will credit Denise Weintraut.

Each year, I talk with classroom teachers who worry about students taking books home to read, worry about books leaving their classroom, all over the fear of a book not finding its way back to it's home in the classroom library.

So this quote got me thinking.

Aside from the books that get lost in student desks and lockers, where else do these books go when they leave the classroom?

If we truly want to get books into the hands of all students and develop a passion for reading, does it matter if some them stay forever in the hands of a student who went on a journey with it, learned from it, or connected to it in some way we will never know?

OK, I understand that ever-shrinking district budgets and lack of funding for classroom libraries plays into this worry and somewhat possessiveness over the books in our libraries. Teachers work...and spend...to build up their libraries and don't want to risk a never-ending battle to continually replace lost books while still adding the latest authors and series.

It comes to down to looking at it another way.
If books are missing from classroom libraries, it is because a student has it. A student. And isn't that the goal in the first place?