Meet the Book Ladies
Jaime Buck is a licensed social worker with a bachelor’s degree in Sociology from Loyola University, a master’s degree in Sociology from the University of New Orleans and a master’s degree in Social Work from Tulane University. Her career began as a researcher at Tulane studying homelessness and addictions in New Orleans. After having her two children, her focus shifted to working with children and families. Since that time, Jaime has spent many years as a Parent Educator at the Parenting Center at Children’s Hospital and at Early Learning Focus (a local non-profit) teaching social emotional and literacy skills to children in New Orleans public charter schools as well as tutoring young children in reading.
Maggie Tufail is a certified teacher with a bachelor’s degree in Communication Disorders and a master’s degree in Special Education, both from Louisiana State University. Throughout her career, she has taught Pre-K and Kindergarten students with autism and developmental delays and served as a middle school special education support teacher. She has also worked as a hospital-bound teacher, assisted in teacher training programs, tutored second and third graders in reading, and worked with Early Learning Focus teaching social emotional and literacy skills to children in New Orleans schools.
Our History
Streetside Library is a nonprofit mobile library service that supplements existing library resources in homeless shelters and low-performing public schools in the greater New Orleans area by bringing targeted, exciting, diverse, and expansive book collections to young people.
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We work with shelters serving families, women and children, and youth living on their own, by designing, organizing, and curating libraries. We transform unused and under-utilized spaces into libraries with expansive book collections by supplementing existing libraries with books from our collection and providing weekly maintenance. We also take requests for desired books, introduce book reviews, and give recommendations to residents. And for the younger readers, we will provide literacy-based, age-appropriate activities that encourage conversation and higher-order thinking.
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We provide residents assistance with developing a home library when leaving the shelter through donations from our community and organization. Having books at home creates a space where there can be a culture of reading, and it encourages family time to read together or in parallel, as well as encourages rereading books. Rereading is important to young children's literacy development, and having books at home that they love and that interest them makes it easy.
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Streetside Library also works with teachers, especially those just starting out, in classrooms to collaborate on high-quality book selections that align with their student’s interests and the current themes and lessons in the classroom. We work closely with teachers to select authors whose books resonate with students, reflect classroom diversity, and meet curriculum needs. We use checklists and guidelines from well-researched literature to help develop classroom libraries with loans from our collection and recommendations for teachers to provide students with a literacy-rich environment in which to learn.
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Our library contains vibrant and diverse book collections specially curated to meet the needs of children and families in their community. A core collection promotes emergent literacy development and social and emotional learning. The book collections are age-appropriate and high-interest, and they contain titles that are recently released, classic, and award-winning and align with curricula and recommended reading lists.