Washington’s Pro-Library Moms Score Partial Victory

By Joan Oleck -- School Library Journal, 3/14/2008 3:30:00 AM

Score one for the “Washington Moms.” The three Spokane women who have been passionately pleading their case to adequately fund and improve school libraries statewide succeeded this week in convincing their state legislature to put an $4.0 million “school libraries” line item into the state budget.

The $4.09 per pupil outlay, starting next school year, may seem small, but Washington has joined only a small group of states that actually budget for school libraries rather than rely on local taxpayer disbursements. “There aren’t that many states where there is a line item for school library materials and positions,” explains Sara Kelly John, president of the American Association of School Librarians (AASL)

Johns has particular praise for Susan McBurney, Denrette Hill, and Lisa Layera Brunkan, who in less than one year created a Web site [www.fundourfuturewashington.org] and mounted a state campaign, organized a rally at the legislature, and testified before state committees. “The whole progression was unusual,” Johns says, “[in] the fact that this was started by a group of parent advocates and funded so quickly. It often takes years and years to make such inroads.”

McBurney says she’s delighted that the legislature’s confirmation of the budget item for school libraries. “This is brand new money,” McBurney says, and it was approved during a supplemental budget year, when funds are tight. “We’re thrilled that the Senate’s allocation, or part of it, is in the final budget.”

McBurney explained that the Moms’ campaign had hardly been a clean sweep: A bill that would have accomplished even more than the budget item died in a House committee; and its companion bill in the Senate was scaled back. Nevertheless, the bill “passed out of the Senate with a unanimous floor vote and some really impassioned pleas from Senators,” McBurney points out.

When the Senate bill arrived in the House, it too died, in the House education committee, McBurney adds. The funding stayed in the Senate budget and survived a compromise action with the House. But it removed language that McBurney characterizes as concerning the “important role that school libraries and qualified librarians play in education.”

The deleted language specifically would have funded the budget item with $11.7 million, would have called upon a currently operating joint task force on basic education finance to consider school library programs as part of a definition of basic education that is to be created and presented to the legislature next fall.

Still, McBurney says she’ll take what she and the other moms can get. AASL’s Johns, meanwhile, offers credit for what they’ve achieved to date. “School librarians are in a constant state of PR,” Johns says. “PR, marketing, and advocacy—to maintain a solid budget.”