Since starting my program, the discussion of tight budgets for the library media center has been a common theme. It was discussed in the SLJ article "Brace Yourself: SLJ's school library spending survey shows hard times aren't over, and better advocacy is needed" that public school libraries have seen about a 4.8% budget drop in the last school year. Because of budget cuts, according to the article, library media specialists have had to cope with stagnant payrolls and lack of trained support staff to keep the library media center at its best.
I had a discussion with a classmate in the spring about the budgets and she mentioned that while her internship placement had created a new library and bought all new books, the library (the books and the center as a whole) is found lacking in giving students the books needed for both classroom and pleasure reading because they never consulted a school librarian (or any kind of librarian) to get the books that students need. It's said in "Budgeting as Easy as 1 2 3" that there is a three step process to budgeting in order to keep it stabilized and implemented in such a way that library media center's running in a functional manner even if the library is on a low budget. These three steps are knowledge (knowing how to build a functional budget), planning (prioritizing what is important to spend hard to come by dollars for the LMC), and implementation (how are you going to keep track of the money, knowing where each dollar is being spent down to the T). If more library media specialists did these kinds of things, I'm sure that we'd make the money go a long way and not only that, cause administration notice our great organizational skills. My first placement showed me how she kept track of her budgeting by using an Excel spreadsheet. It was simple, easy to use, and could easily find where the money was being spent. I was impressed.
Because of the low budgets for library media centers, I always wondered if a media specialist would be able to write grants in order to purchase things that are needed and "Winning Grants" seemed to answer that question. It gave helpful hints on what to do when writing a grant (using simple words to get to the point, etc). The biggest thing I got out of this article was to know what your purpose is and centering your grant around what you need for the media center rather than what you'd like, because after all, you're creating a place for children so that they can study, learn, and read rather than seeing how pretty the library looks. Writing a grant to get a small cafe for the library is inconsequential in comparison to purchasing current books that students want to read, for example.
So all in all, strategic planning is one of the keys to a great library media center. We need to evaluate, identify strengths and weaknesses, and create a plan (and budget) in order to continue developing our library media centers (AASL, Empowering Learners). Because really, without the library media center, how are students and teachers going to be able to implement and create learning without the tools that the library media center offers?
On time, on target:-)
ReplyDeleteI would refine what you said about grant somewhat. The focus MUST be on what you are going to DO, not what you are going to get. How what you are going to do is going to solve a documented need related to student learning.