The Carter County Imagination Library will be considering changes to the annual Educators Hall of Fame celebration to help increase participation in the event.

Participation and applications for the dinner were down this year, organizer Susan Dugger said. She asked the CCIL board if they had thought of making changes to the celebration.

“I don’t know if everyone is so busy, or if they don’t want to take the time to do it, but the numbers were not that good this year,” Dugger said.

Each year, the CCIL hosts a dinner and inducts two teachers each – one retired and one deceased – from the city and county school systems into the Hall of Fame. The honorees are chosen based on applications submitted from the public.

“You would think with the number of high quality educators we have in this county we would have had an overabundance of applicants,” she said. “But, we did not.”

The CCIL saves applications for teachers who are not selected for the Hall of Fame and consider them for selection in the next year.

Board member Billye Joyce Fine suggested the board revise the application to let people know the award is more about personal impact than teaching experience.

“We need to let them know we are looking for more personal information and stories about how these teachers made an impact in someone’s life,” Fine said. “We want to know how many lives these people have changed. We want to make it more personal.”

The CCIL is no longer receiving books returned to the Imagination Library due to wrong addresses. Because of a post office policy change around two years ago, books can no longer be returned to the CCIL for free. If the agency wants the books returned, they must pay for return shipping which is often more than the cost of the book, CCIL Chairwoman Lilo Duncan said.

“It was just costing us too much to get them back,” she said.

The CCIL is now looking into alternate ways to collect the addresses on the books that are not returned. The information is needed to update the database so that books are sent to the correct people.