>From Bibliotech.me:
Dear Fellow Librarians:
This weekend at ALA Midwinter, there was a massive push to collect signatures for AASL President Carl Harvey's appeal
to launch a conversation at the federal level about securing a
librarian for every K-12 school.
As you may remember this is the second
petition this school year. One was drafted in October, and it failed
because we were unable to collect the required number of signatures. So
we are trying again.
In spite of HUGE efforts from conference leaders and attendees, we actually went backwards this weekend.
As of Saturday, we needed to collect 1,000 signatures per day until our petition expired, but we only collected 726 over
the weekend. Now we need 1160 per day, every day, until 2/4/2012.
How can we achieve this? There are 60,000 ALA members (ALA, not AASL). The
current number of ESEA signatures
represents 18% of that total body,
many of whom are not as invested as school librarians in this
initiative. We need to reach out to other communities - not just
librarian
communities.
We need to involve vendors, colleagues, students
(13 years-old and over - this is a great civics lesson, by the way!),
family, friends, etc. It's not enough to sign, There simply aren't
enough of "us" to push this through.
On Saturday, Follett Software responded to a Twit-plea: "@mluhtala - We support @aasl @caharvey2 ESEA petition 4 k-12 libraries ow.ly/8BJu3". While much appreciated, is it enough? Only if the organization asks its employees to sign, and
then encourage colleagues, friends and family to do the same.
Let's face it, they have a stake in this too! Everyone who relies on
school librarians to acquire or promote their products does. It's a very, very long
list, but here is a start: Gale/Cengage, ProQuest, EBSCO, ABC-CLIO,
EasyBib, NoodleTools, School Library Journal, Barnes and Noble,
SlideRocket, Glogster, Animoto, EdModo, and so on.
The upside of all this is advocacy. The conversation alone reminds
people about the essential-ness of school librarians' role in teaching and
learning. We are more indispensable now than ever before. But
every time we launch a new petition, our effort is diluted by prior
failed attempts. If this one fails, many solicitees will likely say, "Oh
no, that thing again?" the next time we launch one. So PLEASE
participate in this effort. While your signature is appreciated,
it is not enough! We need more. And just in case you missed the link, here it is: wh.gov/Wgd.
Thank you!
Michelle Luhtala
AASL Region I Director-Elect
