Fund Our Future Blog

The latest:

We continue to fight here on the ground in Washington for permanent and ample funding for our school libraries and to elevate awareness that information literacy be made equitable for all. December 8th we will learn if the Joint Task Force on Basic Education Finance will issue recommendations which include protection for our school library programs. FundourFutureOregon has a SPONSOR in the legislature! Congratulations!! FundourFutureArizona is fighting hard to reverse massive cuts to library programs in Arizona.  Thank you for staying with us– here’s hoping that in a not so distance future library champions from around the country can say, ‘yes we did’!

• An open letter to President-Elect Obama, submitted at Change.govPlease champion a federal initiative that stewards in the 21st century by making information literacy equitable for all of our children.  I am a Mom in Washington State who has been joined by over 10,000 other Moms, businesspeople, retired people, teachers, principals etc. in trying to fight for school library funding, teacher-librarians and information literacy. What exists today? An institution at risk, stewards who have been called an endangered species, and a highly inequitable system in which some children are information-rich while others remain information-poor.

  Our school libraries are hemorrhaging after decades of neglect, and despite the technological advances of our age, teacher-librarians are being down-sized, reduced, and in many instances replaced by aides.  This at the very time the crucial transition to viewing teacher-librarians as information architects should be taking place.  There is a desperate need for money, vision, and action before it’s too late.

  Right now in the state of Washington (and we are not alone, this is a snapshot of a national epidemic) high schoolers are being graduated having learned to do research with collections that have a copyright average of 1979. We have a janitor / part-time librarian (with mere hours of training) teaching one community’s children, and many other communities have seen the complete elimination of K-8 certificated teacher-librarians. Many programs are simply not able to offer information literacy as they struggle to keep the library doors open.  Meanwhile, in Microsoft’s backyard, we have a district in which all children, from Kindergarten on, are learning about copyright law, intellectual property, and podcasting; this district’s students and teachers benefit from phenomenal literacy collaboration, with certificated teacher-librarians in every single school, no matter the size. It is truly a tale of two educations when you consider that an elementary school on the Yakima Indian Reservation recently weeded out over 2,000 titles with copyrights of 1979 and older (among the titles were The Redman’s Cookbook and a technology book announcing the launch of DOS). There is no money to replace these books; the biography section is down to two shelves and, sadly, the most popular paperback fiction titles have a shelf life of only a year before the tape holding them together renders the books unusable.

  Whether one believes this to be an issue of social justice, democracy, or views it through the lens of academic achievement, this is an investment that needs to be made so our children can compete, our companies can hire a modern workforce, and, most importantly, our young people can flourish in 21st century society.

  School library funding has been described as ‘budget dust’ to us in our state capitol of Olympia; it is one of those few issues that requires a small investment that will yield maximum reach and infinite return.

  Concrete ideas?

  Sponsor early on, as part of your (great) idea to appoint a Chief Technology Officer, the following:

  • Emergency funding for our school libraries — 21st Century Classroom: 21st Century Media Center.  All across the country school districts are turning out the lights and literally locking the library doors; this due to lack of funding and, quite frankly, silence, on the federal level, concerning the importance of school library and information literacy programs. 
  • A federal initiative that creates a synthesized, defined vision for what ‘21st century skills’ means, U.S. style. Ideally, this would bring the public and private sectors together, along with other stakeholders, to really move this idea of 21st century skills beyond rhetoric to actionable recommendations that create equity for our K-12 (20) students. Places like the European Union and Singapore are moving aggressively on this and have been for years (Manitoba Province, for goodness sake, is as well!).   We need the long-view from D.C. to ensure that the digital divide doesn’t continue to widen, but rather is bridged through the equitable teaching of skills that will allow safe crossing for ALL of our children. As it stands now, information literacy is a luxury in this country, this at the very time we need leadership to make it a 21st century ‘basic’.
  • Federal vision which links technology funding to proper professional development for our classroom teachers.  When well-trained and certified, teacher-librarians are the schoolhouse’s Chief Information Officer, they are uniquely positioned to collaborate with classroom teachers and help them develop the necessary technology skills and instructional strategies needed to integrate technology into teaching and learning.  Providing funding for peer-coaching initiatives would help make this a reality for all schools.  [See the Puget Sound Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology for an example of this kind of program: http://www.psctlt.org/. It’s terrifying to me as a parent that the Center considers their U.S. initiative to be small scale; while they are active in 47 other countries who are moving forward with abandon on this issue, they are only active in a handful of US states.]

  Thank you for providing this forum; it was brought to my attention days ago, before it hit the press.  By whom? A teacher-librarian!  Please do everything you can to take immediate action so that the school library makes it to the end of this century, teacher-librarians can transition successfully to being 21st century information specialists, and our country is mindful to have substance and vision behind funding. 

  We need national standards and a clear policy framework in place.  If this does not happen, our state and local leaders will likely continue to view teacher-librarians as shelvers of books (antiquated ones at that!), school libraries as obsolete or, as is the case in so many instances, shuttering  not only the library doors but effectively closing the door on information literacy because the money is simply not available to do otherwise.  How many of this generation’s Sherman Alexies, Junot Diazes, Naomi Shihab Nyes, Nobel Laureates, and Bill Gateses are being denied the very refuge and inspiration that may lead them to greatness?

  THANK YOU FOR LISTENING!!!

Lisa in Spokane, WA

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 2:17 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.