A Recipe for Success
School librarians convince the Baltimore County school district to spend more money on books
Staff -- School Library Journal, 5/1/2000
Here's Della Curtis's plan for winning support for your school-library program. First, says Curtis, you need qualified staff. Then you need a highly visible school-library program. Then you need numbers showing the sorry state of your book collections. And perhaps most important: "You can't be timid." 
Curtis took over as library coordinator of the Baltimore County, MD, public schools three years ago, and so far her plan has worked. The county school board just approved $10 million over three years to buy new books for the district's middle and high schools. If passed by the county council, the appropriation will bring in some $180 per pupil.
That's on top of a $376,000-a-year state grant the district won for elementary schools in 1998. The five-year grant is matched by the district.
Baltimore County sorely needs the money. The sprawling district, which includes 106,000 students in the region surrounding the city of Baltimore, has collections that are decades out of date. For instance, 88 percent of high school library books have copyrights prior to 1990. And per-pupil spending on books--$5.86--is the sixth lowest in the state. (Under site-based management, some schools spend as little as $1.77 per pupil.)
"I feel so inadequate; I'm almost at the point where I want to apologize to the kids when I don't have anything on a topic or what I have is old," says Ann O'Neill, a high school librarian.
Curtis and others say the district's library programs plummeted in the '90s because of a lack of leadership--Curtis's predecessor had no library background-- and because the district focused on buying technology instead of books. When Curtis took over, there were many schools without librarians.
She developed a program that gave teachers tuition reimbursement to earn library degrees part-time. Next the librarians worked on showing the benefits of a good library program. One result: "online research modules" that guide students through the research process. Finally, Curtis and her staff used library automation software to generate numbers that proved their collections were small and out-of-date.
The numbers did the trick. Last July, Curtis presented the data to the superintendent and his staff. Says Curtis: "I didn't even get finished and the superintendent said, 'We have to fix this.'"
--Andrea Glick
