[CASL-L] Your signature is not enough. We need more!

[Michelle Luhtala]

>From Bibliotech.me:

Dear Fellow Librarians:

This weekend at ALA Midwinter <http://www.alamidwinter.org/>, there was a
massive push to collect signatures for AASL President Carl Harvey's
appeal<https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#%21/petition/ensure-every-child-america-has-access-effective-school-library-program/tmlbRqfF>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<http://www.ala.org/membership/>(
ALA <http://ala.org/>, not AASL <http://www.ala.org/aasl/>). The current
number of ESEA signatures<https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#%21/petition/ensure-every-child-america-has-access-effective-school-library-program/tmlbRqfF>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
<https://twitter.com/#%21/follettsoftware>responded to a Twit-plea:
*"@mluhtala <https://twitter.com/#%21/mluhtala> - We support
@aasl<https://twitter.com/#%21/aasl>
@caharvey2 <https://twitter.com/#%21/caharvey2> ESEA
petition<https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#%21/petition/ensure-every-child-america-has-access-effective-school-library-program/tmlbRqfF>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 <https://twitter.com/#%21/galecengage>,
ProQuest<https://twitter.com/#%21/proquest>,
EBSCO <https://twitter.com/#%21/EBSCOInfoSvcs>,
ABC-CLIO<https://twitter.com/#%21/ABC_CLIO>,
EasyBib <https://twitter.com/#%21/easybib>,
NoodleTools<https://twitter.com/#%21/noodletools>,
School Library Journal <https://twitter.com/#%21/SLJournal>, Barnes and
Noble <https://twitter.com/#%21/BN_care>,
SlideRocket<https://twitter.com/#%21/SlideRocket>,
Glogster <https://twitter.com/#%21/glogster>,
Animoto<https://twitter.com/#%21/animoto>,
EdModo <https://twitter.com/#%21/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!

<http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-N-kQypytJ2U/Tx1tupaCYLI/AAAAAAAABms/E0hTs51oKUc/s1600/Photo+from+ABC+fundraiser+Jeanne7.jpg>

Michelle Luhtala
AASL Region I Director-Elect
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