[aisle] advocacy for a higher book budget

[Dawn Scuderi]

Hi Lori,

I actually just went through this myself.  My middle school has an aged
collection...average age 1991.  I did a few big things.
1.  I inventoried and put my collection through collection analysis.  If
you use Destiny, you can do it right from there with Titlewave.
2. I looked at my circulation stats.  Nonfiction hardly ever checks out and
that is, in my opinion, partially because the students don't feel that
there's anything of interest.
3.  I talked to my ELA teachers.  I asked them what they are seeing?  In my
building, our MAP testing scores for ELA nonfiction had a considerable drop
in the second half of the year for 7th graders.  This was hard data that I
could bring to my admin and say, "I think the library can help with this".
4.  Walk your admin through the collection.  Nothing gets admins attention
like aged and falling apart books.  Once I showed her some in person
examples of the nonfiction collection in the flesh, she talked to our
superintendent.
5.  Make a commitment to try for grants.  If admin sees that you are
putting in some time and effort to improve things without your hand out,
they are way more likely to pitch in.
Right now, RAILS has their "My Library Is" grant.  It is open for 2 more
weeks.  Even just saying that I was trying for stuff like that, helped my
admin see commitment.

A plan was requested by my superintendent and admin for how much of an
increase I thought would be necessary to make a marked improvement over the
next 5 years.  Part of that plan includes the removal of a large portion of
books that are outdated and replacing some of them with more high interest
narrative nonfiction.

If you email me off the listserv, I will send you a copy of the completed
proposal.

Hope this helps,

Dawn



On Fri, Apr 1, 2022 at 11:39 AM Lala Lala via AISLE <
aisle at list.railslibraries.info> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Can you please share some advocacy points and data about why I need a
> higher budget for books to serve my students?
>
> Thank you for any help.
>
> --
> Lori McGreal
>
>
> MAILMAN_MIMEDEFANG
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