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Advocacy Assistant Kansas Students A+chieve Because of Great School LIbraries! |
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September 2005 |
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In this issue:
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Some top reasons to work with your faculty:
Remember: It's not what you do, it's the attitude with which you do it !! |
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Promoting your collection with displays Take advantage of the numerous opportunities in the yearly library calendar to highlight areas of your collection. Use tablecloths, poster board, stuffed animals, etc. to "jazz" up your book displays! A few promotional opportunities include:
Be sure to work in a statistic or two about school libraries/librarians making a difference in reading scores and overall students achievement! For additional promotions that you can program into your library year, see the KASL Promotions page: <http://www.kasl.ws>. |
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Writing to your legislator Following is a sample letter written to a legislator regarding the Post Audit Survey sent to all superintendents from the Kansas State Treasurers' office. On that survey, librarians are listed under "other" or non-essential staff instead of "instructional staff" or essential, and, libraries are not inlcuded in the list as "classrooms." Please visit with your superintendent about including any and all personnel and programs that are essential to having an effective school. --------------------------- Martha House PO Box 61 Council Grove, KS 66846 620-767-5149 August 27, 2005 Dear Representative Weber: I agree that school funding should go toward classroom instruction. I would like to point out, however, that even though school libraries are not officially counted as “classroom instruction,” they exist for instruction, and librarians are instructors. I am the librarian at Council Grove High School, and I have devoted my life to educating children and helping provide the resources teachers need to teach effectively. I also regularly teach students things like “How to Narrow a Topic,” “Searching the Internet Effectively,” “Avoiding Plagiarism,” “Properly Citing Sources,” and “Using Technology to Prepare a Quality Class Assignment” to name just a few. I also promote reading, both for pleasure and for academic study. The more students read, the better readers they are. I am closely involved with curriculum planning and implementation in my school. I teach information literacy and effective use of information technology to both teachers and students. On a slow day (usually at the beginning of the year), sixty-five students visit my library. On a busy day, based on statistics from the 2004-05 school year, I see one-hundred-and-fifty. That’s almost half our total student population! For the most part, these are students using library resources to study and classes of students working on specific projects. CGHS can use our resources more efficiently and cost effectively if books and computer labs are available in a central location and available to everyone. As a result of all this activity, I positively impact student academic achievement. Research shows there is a direct correlation between high quality school library media programs and student achievement. In fact, the highest achieving students come from schools with good library media centers having full-time, licensed media specialists. Refer to the Ohio Study <http://www.oelma.org/StudentLearning/SLFindings.asp>. The results have been duplicated multiple times. If you need more references to research studies, please let me know. "School libraries help teachers teach and children learn," noted First Lady Laura Bush, a former public school teacher and librarian, when convening the White House Conference on Children and Libraries in June of 2002. "Children and teachers need library resources--especially books--and the expertise of a librarian to succeed. Books, information technology, and school librarians who are part of the schools' professional team are basic ingredients for student achievement," Mrs. Bush said. Research has shown that the larger the library collection, the more students read. The better the library staffing, the more students read and achieve. Please remember that libraries exist for instruction and that librarians are indeed instructors. District money spent on libraries should count as classroom instruction funding. Sincerely, Martha House |
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*Brought to you by your KASL Advocacy Committee: Pat Allensworth, Barbara Bahm, Roberta Kobbe, Nancy McFarlin, Sheri Roberts, Cheri Zabel |