Guest post by Steven Baule, Superintendent at Muncie Community Schools, Indiana: Next Friday, June 23, the Illinois School Library Media Association is holding a rally in Chicago at noon to restore a school librarian to every school. As schools continue to be squeezed for funding, many see school library programs as expendable. Many schools across the country have replaced librarians with paraprofessionals and have not looked to the potential value of professional library staff. Recently, Karen Sullivan wrote about the changing role of school libraries in AASA’s journal. AASL has several position statements about the role of school libraries and ESSA. Watching this process, it is essential that we hold school librarians and educational technologists to high standards. As professionals ancillary to the classroom, it is too easy to find such programs on the chopping block when budgets tighten. It is too late to advocate for programs once they are on the chopping block. It is important that school library programs, technology initiatives, and similar programs advocate for themselves and secure other stakeholders to advocate for them. This will help ensure that strong programs will be sustained as they will never even be considered for the chopping block. Many of the training guides on advocacy developed by EveryLibrary.org are great and applicable beyond library settings. School psychologists have a good set of advocacy tools on their website as well. The Association of Career and Technical Education also has nice set of advocacy tools available. These are skills every educator needs to hone given today’s bleak fiscal environment in so many states.
