This afternoon, I will attend an event that is both happy and sad. Friends and colleagues will be celebrating Frances Bradburns many years of professional service to education in North Carolina and way beyond. She is retiring, and many of us are not happy about it. It seems that her accomplishments are at their peak. But they shall continue to grow, because, like any good educator, what she has said, done, built, and taught will continue on in everyone who has worked with her.
When I first met Frances Bradburn, she was a professor of Library Science at East Carolina University. She was one of those bigger than life people, because her name and reputation so impressively preceded her. I know that before her academic work at ECU, Frances supported hundreds of library media specialists at one of the eastern regional service centers and became a listened-to voice in the entire state.
During the last two years that I worked for the NC State Department of Public Instruction, Frances joined us with the Division of Media and Technology Services. This is where I got to know her, as we shared a wall between our two cubicles. I clearly remember the conversations that floated up over that wall, and it was from her that I learned how closely the worlds of media and technology really are, and how we need to be integrating them as we help our children to be prepared for their futures. It’s a message that she delivered so well at every level.
After I left DPI, Frances began to more formally formulate her thinking in a book called, Output Measures for School Library Media Programs. One reader says:
Excellent source of data gathering charts that media specialists can use to justify budgets, staffing, scheduling and program curriculum needs to those in charge of school funding for libraries.
Finally, Frances was persuaded to become the Director of the Division of Media & Technology Services. (I don’t know what it’s called now. They’re always changing things there.) It was during these years of leadership that she and her staff assembled the IMPACT model, which married media and technology in the schools that addopted it, and emphasized, above all other things, the value and crucial need forprofessional collaboration.
I know, first hand, of teachers who were ready to retire within months, but decided to continue their work after their schools adopted the IMPACT model — and they are teaching still.
Thank you Frances Bradburn!
I’ll second that one, David. Frances is one of those articulate professionals with uncanny insight, future-foreward thinking, and political savvy.
To a large degree, NC’s incredibly massive educational technology initiative was spawned in media centers with Frances Bradburn as the guiding light.
…and never once were printed books relegated to secondary status.
David,
I, too, have known Frances for many years. She and I were tech directors at the same time, and worked in SREB and SETDA together. She has always been such an incredible visionary and so many of us look up to her. I’m glad for her, but the ed tech media world sure will miss her!
~Chris O’Neal