Bryanna Lopez
The following interview has been edited and condensed.

Sarah Alvarado wearing her unicorn headband standing in front of her decorated crows. 

When Alvarado was in school, she lived in the library, having always loved reading but throughout her life she watched as her friends around her didn’t have a place where they could be their full, authentic selves. It took a toll on their mental health, and as a result, she experienced the loss of friends and family. Through these experiences, Alvarado made it her goal to provide students with a safe environment that her friends did not have through  the library.

For the past 27 years, Sarah Alvarado, a librarian at Azusa High School, has been bringing a wide variety of books onto the campus. She reawakens the students’ love of reading and educates the students on their own cultural backgrounds. In addition to providing students with an education, the library is a safe haven for everyone.. 

 Do you agree that you’re responsible for providing a safe learning environment for students?

“Yes, I would rather have an open library, so that everybody can come in. But everybody knows my expectations with words that are not said here, how you’re supposed to behave and that anxiety is something that everybody knows and deals with. And I’m not going to allow any shenanigans that would cause anxiety to rise.”

What are some strategies that you use to promote said environment?

“ I like to wear my tutu, my unicorn horn. My little bouncy flamingo because people will think I’m goofy. That’s a lot more disarming than arms folded, giving you a dirty look. That’s reserved for mashing bananas on the carpet or shredding books. It’s something that I learned from the librarian who taught me, who was also my history teacher. He would come to school dressed up in full costume. He committed to it. So, when I first started in the high school library with him, he put me in a gorilla suit, and we ran around campus. The sillier you look, the more curiosity you get, and the more people realize that this is a safe space, they will follow. It’s just a gimmick that has to be there to get them to come in. And you also have to be friendly and personable, so that [students] know I’m a safe person to be around. “

 “I do not care how you identify, so long as you’re healthy and happy, that is all that matters to me. If someone came and told me that they were a fuzzy bunny, I’d go with it, because I have seen too many underrepresented populations being abused and have no safe place to be. That’s where trouble occurs and I’ve lost a lot of friends for not fitting into the social norm. I lost them to suicide, drug use, overdose, and, in one case, self-emulation, because he was an idiot, and he was also high. I don’t ever want you guys to feel that you don’t have a safe place to be, where you can be yourself. Because you can’t take over the world if you don’t have the confidence to take over the world.”

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What do you like most about being a school librarian?

“My kids.”

Are they what keep you passionate?

“Oh, yes. When you think about it, I will get [students] for four or two years. That amount of time to be trusted and loved is going to be worth more than money. It’s going to be worth more than some plastic award. I would rather have time watching [students] grow and change and find out who you are and who you’re meant to be. And the ones that spend the most time with me are the ones that I cannot get rid of, that come to me at five o’clock at night, and they’ve been out of college for four years. That’s what keeps me passionate, because the whole purpose of the library is to ensure that the ones that are raised to be inside, learn that they can go outside and not be a target or be threatened and that [students] are strong enough to ignore the idiots.

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What experiences have changed the way you view students and staff?

“Every event is different. I have had my views change on what is needed through parenting events, actually. Because the parents do not know what it’s like to be in a school library anymore. It changes your perception of what you can do for them, what you can do for their students and at the same time, their little brothers, sisters and little cousins. In all the time that I’ve been doing this, every experience has taught me what to do and what not to do. Like, don’t have a reading event and invite an 8th grader to it without warning them about behavior expectations.

Yeah, books were thrown that day. 

 Everything that [staff]do  is calculated to make sure [students] are enjoying things and to remember. For us to remember that you are children, even though you’re teenagers,  you’re still children at heart, just like we are. I’ve done movie nights here. And to have everybody just lying on the floor is a different experience to the library. And it’s something that reminds you of childhood and two, that the library is more than just books.  It’s a bunch of different things. That’s why the crows are getting decorated. And why the library gets decorated so that it changes with the seasons and [students] have something to draw you in. A goofy librarian is far more enticing than an angry one, because the librarian that I replaced was freaked out when I started because I said hello. I didn’t greet them with what you wanted and why are you here? A hi, what’s up, how’s it going? What do we need? Is more enticing. You learn to read students and people as they come in.

 With  your parents, [students] are a product of the way that you’re raised and how your parents are and then when you see how the parents behave, that explains a lot. This is just a giant social experiment in some ways.”