In the meantime, I would gather up the volunteers and do everything possible to assure that the library is open every day. A private school in our town has an all-volunteer library. We make use of volunteers, but I believe our school would get rid of arts programs before it cut back the library since it is so very necessary in literacy achievement and accelerated reader programs.
I am thinking www.schoolgrants.org
has some grants offered for school libraries. You could do a bunch of internet searches and have a committee to help search through them and see any of those grants apply to you. I think grants are definately worth checking into. Your kids need a library.
You stay on that soapbox, my friend! Children only being allowed to visit the library on a monthly basis is unacceptable. The library should be open daily and if it takes volunteers to man it that's okay. If your system is automated, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to check out books to kids...believe me, I sub in this area often! The teachers could certainly help out in this area if they had to have an "employee" be in charge. As they bring their class in, they could also do the checking in and out. You didn't say what age level your school is, but at our school (preK-12) the students visit once a week with their classes and can come and go as they please. Without our library, many of these kids wouldn't have any sources for books. Reading and the library should be a key focus of education as far as I'm concerned, not an extra! :cool:
Fortunately, we haven't had cutbacks to the extent that the library hours a drasitically reduced. Our parents had a huge fit when computer problems had it shut down for weeks at the beginning of the year.
For many children, the school library is their main or only source of additional reading material. If we are to improve reading skills, children must practice their skills by reading on a regular basis. How can they do that if they can't get books?!!! But you already know this so...
If you have enough volunteers who are willing to commit their time to cover the library, then I think you should push the school board to expand the hours. The librarian may be holding the hard line, because she is trying to make a point, but the children are suffering. It will take time to fight with the state and federal government to make them understand that education needs to be a priority and I'm sure you don't want to wait that long.
Get your parents together, write and sign a petition, organize your volunteers and make a schedule of when they are available, then go to the school board and demand changes. Keep us posted because some of the rest of us may need to fight for the same thing soon.
Due to budget cuts our elementary schools lost most of their paraprofessionals (many have been hired back in other capacities). However, our libraries were run by paras as well so we lost these good people. We do however have a library director but since she handles all the libraries in town she cannot be hands on at any one school. Our school library is only open 1 day a week with a rotating schedule of every 3 weeks (the children average about 1 visit a month to the library). We have some parent volunteers working in the library however, the director is not ready to allow the doors opened on any additional days as yet. One question: Is anyone experiencing anything similar? Or does anyone know of any grant that might assist us? I have checked "useful resources" on this site but have not found anything that applies. We recently held a meeting of School Council Members, PTO Members and Principals for all our schools K-12, because we all feel that for us this situation is not going to get any better. We continue to hear threats of future reductions to our art, music and phys. ed courses for next year. We have now banded together to try to come up with solutions. Many feel that our tax dollars are not being focused enough on education. We have a group looking into that as well. Anyways, didn't mean to jump on the "old soap box". I have only posted a couple of times on this site but it is always helpful and informative. We are in Massachusetts, but I would be curious to know how things are working elsewhere. Thanks again.
