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NCLB Legislation June 22, 2007

Posted by lwilliams in : Community , add a comment

For the past two years the ALA Washington Office has been working hard to get school librarians into the No Child Left Behind legislation. At ALA Midwinter in 2005, Council passed a resolution directing them to work toward this! This hard work has been successful!!!!

On Tuesday, June 26, 2007 at Library Day on the Hill during the ALA conference here in DC, Senator Jack Reed will introduce his bill, cosigned by Senator Cochran, from Mississippi. There will also be a press conference at 12:00 noon on the House side of South Capital Street between C and D at the blue bookmobile. If you are in the area, regardless of the type of library, please attend and support school librarians everywhere!

Once the bill has been assigned a number — both in the Senate and House, I will post them along with easy directions to contact your Senators and Congressmen to let them know you support the bill, to include school librarians in the highly category.

Support of this bill to get it passed and have school librarians in the highly qualified category in the reauthorization of NCLB will go a long way to helping save our positions and more important — our profession!

There is also a resolution coming before Council on Wednesday, crafted by AASL Executive Committee member Dee Gwaltney to have ALA on record supporting this bill, which wil be sent to Congress.

And a note to all of those who say — in print or in private — that ALA does nothing for us (school librarians) and they should be doing something to save our jobs — well they are, and now is your chance to thank them and get out the support to let Congress know we support this bill.

posted by J. Linda Williams

I’m Spartacus

Posted by Laura Pearle in : ALA2007 , add a comment

You’re having a Spartacus Moment when someone else advocates for you and your program. The question/challenge is: how do we get that to happen? What steps can we take to ensure that advocacy from outside takes root?

The first step is strategic planning. In the Independent Schools Section’s pre-conference, Maureen Sullivan gave us the basic tools to start our strategic planning process. “The process is as important as the plan” was her basic thread.

So, what is strategic planning? It’s making choices, careful choices, that lead to a better allocation of resources (including personnel). Essentially, the old (and current) work needs to go hand-in-hand with your new vision, and strategic planning can help you get there.

Things to remember when embarking on a strategic plan:

The stages of strategic planning include: creating a mission; identifying the stakeholders (could include parents, administrators, faculty, students, local politicians); doing an environmental scan (what’s going around our library in the Big World, and how does that affect us - OCLC’s Future of the Library report is very useful); creating a vision; looking at the strategic directions; performing an internal assessment; identifying areas for change; defining the strategic goals and objectives and creating an action plan; determining how to assess progress and implementing the plan.

Quick definitions: Mission = what we do (eg, We Try Harder); Vision = how we want to carry out the mission; Goals = broad thinking statements to enable Vision; Objectives = goal outcomes; Action Plan = concrete steps to reach Objectives, Goals, Vision

Ms. Sullivan recommended SWOT analysis to help with the internal assessment, and reminded us that “change is frightening: go to where the people already are, and lead them to where you want them to be.”

So, how does Spartacus come in? Using all this strategic planning, you can gather data about the community in which your library resides. What do “they” want? How can you help them get it?

When they know how you can help - be it raising AYP for the NCLB testing, creating a community of learners/readers, whatever - they’ll advocate for you. If we’re all on the same page, if we use language they understand, if we have a seat at the problem-solving table, and there are measurable results, they’ll stand up and be Spartacus.

For more on the advocacy piece, go to Monday’s session on “Everything You Wanted to Know about the 65% Solution…” led by Ann Dutton Ewbank and Deb Logan. Check out the AASL Advocacy Toolkit. Search the web for “Strategic Planning” “School Libraries”.

(posted by Laura Pearle)

NECC 2007

Posted by Debbie Stafford in : Conferences , add a comment

Hello all;

I am heading off to NECC tomorrow, looking forward to it. I hope to attend a number of sessions focusing on information literacy, new technology tools. I will also attend the sessions sponsored by the SIGMS group including the big SIGMS forum.

Anyone else going?

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Posted by D. Stafford