For as long as she can remember, Devyn Reynolds was always in and out of libraries.
Her mother used to take her and her brother to the public library once a week to pick out a book to read. She, also, went to her elementary school’s library once a week; the librarian there was a very big inspiration to her.
So it comes as no surprise that eventually, Ms. Reynolds chose to become a professional librarian, which is how she landed this year at the Upper Campus of Ojai Valley School.
“Going to the library was probably the best thing that [I] did growing up,” Ms. Reynolds said.
She attended the University of Redlands for her undergraduate degree, majoring in English with an emphasis on creative writing. After graduating from Redlands, she became a journalist at the Big Bear Grizzly newspaper in Big Bear, CA. She thoroughly enjoyed connecting with people and learning about their lives when reporting for stories.
“What I really loved about being a journalist was getting to know people on a personal level,” Ms. Reynolds said. “It’s almost an empathetic experience to feel their emotions.”
After a few months, she decided that journalism wasn’t the career she wanted to pursue, so she decided to go back to school and pursued a graduate education in Library Science, getting her degree online from San Jose State University.
After graduating, she worked at a few public libraries, but she jumped at the opportunity to work at the Mountain View College library in Texas, as it was more of an academic environment.
“It was just great to get another side of librarianship,” Ms. Reynolds said.
After working in Texas for a year, she decided to come back to California to be closer to her family in Temecula. While looking for jobs, she found the listing for a job at OVS and it seemed like the perfect place for her.
She hopes to make a book club LEAP and another called “grandma graffiti,” where students can knit inanimate objects around campus. Grandma graffiti is where people will knit something overnight, such as a lamp post, and everybody is surprised to see it the next day.
Students love what she is doing with the library. She knows just how to make everyone feel welcome and make it a space where people love to hang out. Senior Sophia Cluff-Thompson is one of the many students who’ve embraced Mrs. Reynolds’s new presence in the OVS community.
“We were worried that no librarian could compare to our previous one, but Mrs. Reynolds has done an amazing job making the library feel like a fun space to study,” Sophia said.