The Good Fight
RSSA band of subversives in Ohio is thwarting site-based management
Renee Olson, Editor-in-Chief -- School Library Journal, 02/01/2000
In the Buckeye State, there's a school library project that cleverly thwarts the principal who fails to fund the library. It quietly subverts the school's site-based management committee that earmarks money for things other than the media center. It firmly says: "Students need libraries, and we're going to build them." The name of the project, which is in its early adolescent stage, is INFOhio and it's one of the country's few statewide all-in-one automation/electronic resource school library networks.
This grassroots project is subversive because--using a small amount of state money--it gets electronic resources to students, even those who have the misfortune of attending a school that neglects its library. Not surprisingly, this e-revolution is being led by a group of people mad about their work. INFOhio's executive director, the cell phone-toting Theresa "Terri" Fredericka, is one such Ohioan. (You can read more about her in "Coming Soon to a School Near You," beginning on page 50.) In September, I spent several days with her, racing from school to state house to print shop to the next school--all in the interest of putting resources at the fingertips of students. People couldn't tell me enough good things about her, especially since she's arranged for the state to pay for a few online products, including those from Bell + Howell and Encyclopaedia Britannica. She has a lot of library media specialists with emaciated budgets singing her praises--a large constituency even in a state that adequately funds its academic and public libraries.
I think they're also responding to an energy that burns within Fredericka. She stands out in this state of "obsessed" library media specialists--to use her own fond term for her colleagues--for the passion she feels for her work. She is so moved by the prospect of improving school libraries at the state level that four years ago she took the leap from a secure and stable district library coordinator's position to INFOhio, then an embryonic project with an uncertain future. "It shows how strongly she believes in [it]," says fellow obsessive Ellen Stepanian, who is the director of library media at the Shaker Heights City (OH) School District.
With a born entrepreneur like Fredericka at the helm, Ohio library media specialists stand to gain whenever they need greater access to resources. If a service or product doesn't exist, INFOhio creates it, or it convinces someone else to do it. In need of a copy cataloging tool for small libraries, INFOhio members worked with OCLC, long the domain of the academic library, to help develop a new product called CatExpress. It's not likely to stop there. "I can see us in product development and in creating curriculum packages," says Fredericka. The INFOhio crew is also quite determined to jump into statewide interlibrary loan services, using IN-
Fredericka also has a knack for enlisting people to help advance her cause, a large group that includes Michael Wildermuth, whose Lima, OH-based educational computer site, one of 23 in the state, helps run INFOhio's 900-library automation system. She also relies on people in Ohio's larger library community, such as Fran Haley and Carol Roddy, from OPLIN, Ohio's public library network, and Tom Sanville, from OhioLINK, the state's academic library network, all of whom have taken significant steps to help strengthen school libraries.
While I applaud Fredericka and her group for finding a way around poorly implemented site-based management, it riles me that INFOhio is even needed to bandage the harm the practice often does to library media centers. In a sane world, Ohio's Department of Education would simply require a minimum level of funding for library services in each school. After all, INFOhio can't fix everything at the state level. It's not in the business of parachuting library media specialists into schools without professional staff or employing flamethrowers to immolate outdated print materials, such as the 1973 book on venereal diseases I saw at one library.
Failing that, the absolute least Ohio's education officials can do and still call themselves educators in this age of increased expectations for student achievement is to recognize what a gem INFOhio truly is. And give it some cash.
Renée Olson
Editor-in-Chief
rolson@slj.cahners.com
