SCHOOL COULD USE FEW MORE CHAPTERS.

Byline: Patricia Farrell Aidem Staff Writer

STEVENSON RANCH - First-year school librarian Sharon Mellinger has her work cut out for her at the new Rancho Pico Junior High School.

For starters, there are no books in the library.

She's got some ordered and received a $250 donation from a parent to help out, but the stacks will be sparsely filled for a while as Mellinger scrapes together the money it takes to stock a library.

``We have no books, just textbooks,'' Mellinger said Tuesday, the second day of the new school year. ``Unfortunately, this is normal at the beginning for a new school. We try to make sure all the students have textbooks first.''

Mellinger has spent about $28,000 on orders for 1,300 books, just a fraction of the collection she envisions. The goal for school libraries is 15 books per student - nearly 10,000 books for Rancho Pico, which has 658 seventh- and eighth-graders and is growing.

Mellinger has been with the William S. hart Union High School District since 1981, when she began as a campus supervisor. Over the decade she worked as a substitute teacher, then as a history teacher at Arroyo Seco Junior High, before deciding to take on the librarian position at the Santa Clarita Valley's newest junior high.

She looks to the year-old Rio Norte Junior High in Valencia to see how that library evolved.

``We will have a book fair to raise money, we'll do a book adoption where you donate a book,'' she said. ``One parent donated $250, that will buy 10 books. When the school has the magazine drive, I'll ask parents to donate magazine subscriptions. You do it piecemeal. That's how Rio Norte was built.''

This first week of school, Mellinger is scrambling to make sure there are enough textbooks for a campus in the fast-developing Stevenson Ranch/Westridge area.

``We're in a growing area,'' she said. ``I have just two American history books left and I know we're going to need more than that. New students are moving in all the time.''

This week, the Rancho Pico library is being used as a storage room, but Mellinger put the word out that the boxes must go by Friday. She's preparing for a computer lab - once the necessary hook-ups are installed. And she's ordered a $900 World Book encyclopedia set. She and other teachers, she said, like students to use the encyclopedia along with their Internet research.

``When I taught history, I did not want them to find all their information on Internet,'' she said. ``Anyone can put anything there. We need to promote literacy, how to use all kinds of sources for research. As soon as we can.''

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) Sharon Mellinger, librarian at the new Rancho Pico Junior High School, is trying to get the library filled with books.

(2) The goal for school libraries is 15 books per student - nearly 10,000 books for Rancho Pico, which has 658 kids.

David Crane/Staff Photographer