Pending Reed Bill Would Be Boon to School Libraries

The nation's school libraries, chronically neglected for more than 30 years, could soon receive their first significant allocation of federal funds since 1968, through a promising measure called the Reed Amendment. The proposed bill, introduced by Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), would authorize $500 million for local school libraries to buy new books and technology and provide training for librarians. If Congress were to pass the Reed Amendment and fund it at its authorized amount, the $500 million would be the largest federal commitment to libraries ever, more than tripling the current appropriation of federal library funding (roughly $160 million) under the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA). "This is unprecedented," says an excited Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the American Library Association's (ALA) Washington Office. "This is the federal government's way of acknowledging that school libraries play a crucial role in children's reading accomplishments, and that children learning to read is the responsibility of the federal government."

The Senate approved Reed's bill in May as an amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) by a 69–30 margin. At press time, Senate and House conferees were still haggling over provisions of ESEA, which Washington insiders say could come up for a vote the first week of this month, after Congress returns from its Thanksgiving recess. Specifically, the Reed bill is an amendment to President Bush's education initiative, Reading First, a grant program to give poorer schools money to train teachers to help kids acquire the necessary reading skills, as well as to play an integral role in teachers' professional development. The overriding goal of the Bush education initiative is to ensure that every child in America can read before entering the fourth grade. However, ALA and other Reed Amendment advocates reason that Reading First cannot be effective if children have only substandard and outdated books or no books at all in their school libraries. "There has never been a separate line item for school library materials, and that's what so important," says Sheketoff. "If a school fits the formula and qualifies for this money, than the principal cannot take school library materials funds and buy a metal detector or textbooks for the classroom."

According to Sheketoff, school libraries' need for books is so dire that some have not been able to afford to buy new books for their collections since they received substantial federal funds for such expenditures in 1965. Sheketoff says that like Reading First, the Reed Amendment would award funds to schools through a grant program, where schools' eligibility would be determined by their level of financial need, as measured by the federal school lunch program. However, the current provisions of the Reed bill call for the purchase of library materials only for grades one through three.

Although the Reed Amendment has been authorized at $500 million, Congress might fund it at much less, if its conferees are able to hammer out a compromise to pass ESEA. One indication comes from the Senate Appropriations bill, which sets the funding for ESEA as well as other large programs. Of roughly 100 new ESEA initiatives, only one, the Reed Amendment, made it into the Senate Appropriations bill, funded at $25 million, a fraction of its authorized amount.

Sheketoff maintained that whatever the funding levels for the Reed Amendment, its passage and subsequent inclusion as a line item in ESEA would be good news. She explained that once school library materials were secured as an ESEA line item, advocates could work on enhancing the allocation in future years, so that more schools could benefit, and eventually books could also be purchased for older children (beyond grade three).