Washington Moms Fight for School Libraries
By Joan Oleck -- School Library Journal, 1/11/2008 9:32:00 AM
State legislators in Olympia, WA, are getting ready for another encounter with three determined Spokane mothers who have labored almost a year to make school libraries a priority.
Susan McBurney, Lisa Layera Brunkan, and Denette Hill testified January 11 before the Basic Education Finance Joint Task Force, which is drawing up education recommendations for the fall semester. Although this is the third meeting with a task force to discuss school library cutbacks, today marks their first chance that the trio will testify in public.
Their campaign—the Washington Coalition for School Libraries and Information Technology (WSLit for short)—has launched a Web site called Fund Our Future, sold t-shirts that read "Read. Think. Grow", plastered fliers across Spokane's bookstores and libraries, collected 3,300 petition signatures statewide, and mobilized concerned citizens in at least 15 other communities.
"I just feel so strongly that libraries in general are a central component of a healthy society," McBurney says.
The mothers last year unsuccessfully lobbied Spokane's school board to maintain fulltime media specialists at 10 elementary schools in order to meet a $10.5 million budget shortfall for 2007-2008. The move marked the third time such cuts had been made in as many years. "It was an erosion of library services," McBurney says.
During their year-long effort, the mothers have gathered prominent supporters such as State Librarian Jan Walsh; Don Barbieri, chairman of the Red Lion hotels corporation; Michael Eisenberg, founding dean of the University of Washington School of Information; and the Washington Library Media Association.
Their goal is to convince legislators to include school library programs in the state budget and to request a supplementary budget for librarians.
It would cost and estimated $32 million to fund a librarian in every K-12 school in Washington, a goal that McBurney admits is unrealistic. Certified media specialists are not mandated in Washington, and they’re funded at the local, rather than state, level.
Nevertheless, the group has already made an impact because the local media is certainly following their cause, says Representative Skip Priest (D-Federal Way), who is on the 14-member education task force and has expressed support for WCSLit's cause. Priest’s hometown school district laid off 20 school librarians in 2006, due to a $4 million shortfall.
