Jeffco Librarians Need Our Help!

Jefferson County (Jeffco) school librarians are facing potential significant cuts. Please support them by LIKING and SHARING their Facebook Page.   They have over 1000 likes and 300+ people talking about it. Please click “LIKE” & “SHARE” with your friends.  Add your comments, support, & stories.  Their goal is to get 4000 likes before Feb. 2nd when their teacher librarians will present to the school board.

From their Facebook Page:

We are a group of parents, teachers, students, and teacher librarians from Jefferson County, Colorado that appreciate and support our school libraries.  ADVOCATE in a positive manner to save and support Jeffco school libraries!  INSPIRE teacher librarians to work together, support each other, and strengthen the programs we have all worked so hard to create.

Please help EDUCATE the entire Jeffco community about how libraries are vital and how they impact schools, teachers, parents, kids, and the entire community.

Twitter Bomb Today at 5pm

A reminder that a Twitter Blast is scheduled today at 3pm EST. Please support school libraries by tweeting both our senators and your representative.

Twitter Bomb our Representatives

Please share widely…

As Congress continues to work on appropriation bills for FY 2012, we want to make sure they keep school libraries in mind. The Senate Appropriations Committee voted out of committee a bill that included $30 million for literacy, at least half of which must go to school libraries. But the fight for this money is not over.

In order to keep support for school libraries going, we are scheduling another Twitter Bomb for Thursday, Dec. 8, at 3pm EST.

Please tweet the following message at both of your senators and your representative. Below is an example of the tweet directed at Rep. Denny Rehberg of Montana:

@DennyRehberg Keep $30 mil for #literacy and school #libraries in this year’s federal funding!

To find out if your Congressional representatives are on Twitter and what their handles are, visit this website:http://classic.tweetcongress.org/officials/states.

If you find that your representative is on twitter, click their image on the left and that link will take you to his/her acct.

 

Once on your representative’s page, click the silhouette icon,  and enter the message in the field below the ‘Follow’ button.

If your representatives aren’t on Twitter yet, please tweet the message out anyway, to keep the echo chamber going.

Our last Twitter Bomb resulted in over 1000 tweets and elicited a response tweet from Sen. Barbara Mikulski indicating her support for school libraries in ESEA. Let’s make this one even bigger.

Please let me know if you have any questions and happy tweeting.

Ted Wegner

Grassroots Coordinator

American Library Association

Washington Office-Office of Government Relations

1615 New Hampshire Avenue N.W., 1st Floor

Washington, DC 20009-2520

Phone: 202-628-8410

Fax: 202-628-8419

twegner@alawash.org

 

Start Tracking your Impact

As I watched a 3-minute video yesterday that is making the rounds on Facebook (“Two Lesbians Raised a Baby and this is What They Got“), I was struck by two things in this video that are a direct correlation to EFFECTIVE advocacy. In this video, notice how this young adult integrated his personal story into his advocacy message. Another important thing to notice . . . the mothers aren’t doing the advocating…their son is.

For advocacy to truly be effective, it is the most meaningful when it comes from the people who are affected by this person (rather than the person themselves).

So, if you haven’t yet started documenting how you make a difference, I strongly urge you to start TODAY (yes, December 2nd)…it’s not too early.   Here are a couple of simplistic tips that you can start doing today to help you help yourself (especially with upcoming budget talks):

• Start an e-mail file folder of all compliments or any positive feedback from teachers, principals, parents and/or students. Here are two that I recently received that I have saved: “I am a librarian in Troy, Michigan and am working with a committee of teachers and librarians to improve our teacher evaluation procedures for our district. I have been charged with creating the rubric for evaluation of the school library staff and program. I came across your rubric entitled Power Libraries: Colorado’s Highly Effective School Library Programs and I think it is a very good model for how I would like our rubric to look . . . “
  Another: “Your videos are a huge hit and a tremendous resource. Thanks for sharing!”
• When you have a successful program or lesson, ask your students, teachers, or parents to email, tweet or somehow share with you their feedback about that lesson or program. In other words, learn to ask for feedback to put in your documentation. And, if you forget to ask, don’t give up . . . keep reminding yourself…it will eventually become a habit.
• Whip out your cell phone, flip cam or some kind of simple recording device and ask your students on-the-spot to describe what it is they are learning about. You have instant documentation of how you are impacting your students and/or student achievement at your school.

What else? What other quick strategies can you start doing NOW that show how you are helping your students become college and/or career ready in the 21st century?

Seeking Your Feedback

All-
Some of you may have read the well-written editorial recently published by Washington State Teacher of the Year, who is a school librarian.  If not, I urge you to take a moment to ready it.

If things shake out like they normally do, this will get shared amongst school librarians and we will echo his sentiments, but more than likely, we end up sharing these sentiments with our peers. My question to you all is this. How can we share what’s in this article with NON-librarians? Any thoughts? If so, post your comments and/or share with me.  I’d love to hear from you. 
Becky Russell
Russell_b@cde.state.co.us