Miami-Dade's $6 Million Windfall
South Florida district gets seven-figure surplus to buy library books for at-risk schools
By Kathy Ishizuka -- School Library Journal, 6/1/2005
Poorly lit libraries with rickety furniture. Sparse book collections bearing an average copyright date of 1985 and outdated computers in the media center—if there was any equipment at all. That's what Irving Hamer discovered when he made the rounds of the 39 low-performing schools in Miami-Dade County, FL, that he supervises as deputy superintendent of the School Improvement Zone. "The state of the media centers reflected the low achievement of the students," says Hamer. The conditions prompted him to convince the Miami-Dade school board in April to approve a $6 million reallocation of capital improvement funds to purchase new library materials for all Zone schools, cited by Superintendent Rudy Crew this year as requiring extended hours, among other interventions, to address students' poor academic performance.
The $6 million—derived from a surplus resulting from school construction projects completed under budget—far exceeds the $3 to 4 million allocated annually to fund library materials across the entire 320-school district, says Alberto Pimiento, district supervisor of library media services.
Pimiento says the new library fund has been divided among the Zone schools, which are currently assessing their collection needs prior to ordering print and nonprint materials, including DVDs and books on tape, beginning this summer. But the number-one priority will be updating nonfiction books.
That's good news to Gloria Flores, a media specialist at Hialeah-Miami Lakes Senior High School, which is receiving $1 million of the Zone's library money. In Hialeah's current 37,000-book collection, which serves 3,000 students, the average volume is 20 years old. Among them is a book on new technology that refers to an innovation called "electronic mail."
Hamer says he wants to see improvement in each media center by August 1, when school resumes. But Pimiento wants to gradually "replace as we weed" to ensure that the "schools get the collections that they need," he says. "And just having the books in the media center isn't the end of the story. We'll be looking at the instructional component, working with [librarians] on teacher collaboration and other programming." The district will assess the program at year's end "to see what impact we've made," says Pimiento.
And how did Hamer get the money? It was easy, he says, the funds were simply there for the board to grant to school libraries, which are chronically underfunded. Hamer hears the state is urging other districts to do the same with their budget surplus.
