Carrie Scott Banks Author

Carrie Scott Banks has worked with and on behalf of children with disabilities since high school. Taking over Brooklyn Public Library’s Inclusive Services in 1997, she created their gardening program in 1999. Ms. Banks taught inclusion at Pratt Institute from 2013 to 2015 and conducts inclusion trainings across the United States and Canada. She has had many roles in ALA: ASGCLA (Association of Specialized, Government and Cooperative Library Agencies) board member, committee member and chair, program organizer, and co-drafter of resources and tools for serving people with disabilities. Her substantially revised edition of Including Families of Children with Special Needs: A How-To-Do-It Manual for Librarians was published in 2014.

Cindy Mediavilla is the author of several books, including Creating & Managing the Full-Service Homework Center, which has been called “the quintessential guide to the practicalities of setting up a formal homework help center to provide one–to–one homework assistance to student patrons” (Intner, Homework Help from the Library, ix). In the early 1990s Mediavilla managed a homework center, called the Friendly Stop, for the Orange (CA) Public Library, and she has been studying after–school homework programs ever since. She has published several articles on the topic and has evaluated homework programs for the Long Beach and Los Angeles public libraries. She has made presentations on homework help programs at the conferences of several major library associations, and she has also conducted many workshops on the topic. In 2007, Cindy and her husband converted their home lawns to drought-tolerant California native plant gardens. Their home has been featured on several garden tours, including Theodore Payne Foundation’s prestigious annual tour. A former public librarian for 18 years, Mediavilla has both an MLS degree and a doctorate in library science from UCLA.