Does Your Principal Know How Your LMC is Affecting Student Achievement?

Do you send monthly reports to your principal on the number of materials circulated, teacher collaboration project results, new technologies, or other items?  Do you spend time with your principal one-on-one to update them on the number of students visiting the library on their own or with a class?  Do you have activities in your library such as poetry slams or book clubs that you inform your principal about the learning outcomes?   I hear that some do give reports to principals and others hardly see their principal.  For those of you that do communicate with your principals on a regular basis, what do you talk about?  What questions do they ask you?  What information do you give them?  Or what information would you like to give them?  A media tech in one of my elementary schools recently asked me about this as a follow-up to my comment to share their circulation statistics with their principals in a monthly report and/or meeting.  I decided to post this question to the Calling All School Librarians blog to gather input from across the state to share with all of our district media staff.  Please share this information in the comments section of this post so that everyone can benefit by your input.  

Do you utilize the reports that can be run through vendor collection analysis packages that if shared, would give principals information about your collections and help justify their need to be updated, expanded? Did you complete the Colorado surveys of past years or the AASL survey that was due March 15^th ?   The report from this survey has valuable information to review with your principal as well – especially as your data compares with other schools similar to yours in Colorado or nation-wide.  The second year of AASL’s longitudinal survey, “School Libraries Count!” just closed yesterday.  Participation from those who completed the survey last year is even more valuable this year to use in comparisons.  This data from Colorado’s past years is available on the Library Research Service’s website:  http://www.lrs.org/school_stats.php  

This year’s survey posed additional questions about social networking and other electronic tools used in instruction by school library staff and their classroom teacher collaborators. The purpose of this annual survey is to provide longitudinal data for advocacy at the local, state, and national level. Data since the first year has appeared in articles by eSchool News, Education Week, and several general newspapers. Questions regarding the survey may be directed to aasl@ala.org or researched at http://www.ala.org/ala/aasl/slcsurvey.cfm 

Thank you for your comments and all you do for Colorado’s kids.

PS:  Sizing Up America’s School Libraries: the First Annual Report on the AASL Longitudinal Survey of School Library Media Centers (AASL National Conference, Reno, October 26, 2007) is now available on the AASL website 

And, watch Keith Curry Lance talk about School Libraries Count! - FYI – I had to view this from home on my laptop to see it.