AASL Wants Your Input, Now!
Dodie Ownes -- School Library Journal, 2/18/2009
AASL’s annual survey, School Libraries Count!, aims to gain a better understanding of the state of school library media programs by gathering data on the changes in the field. All K-12 schools, public and private, are invited to participate. The annual survey results will be used in a longitudinal series to provide information on the health of school library media programs across the country. This year, AASL has added questions on English Language Learner (ELL) programs. The 2009 School Libraries Count! survey closes on March 12.In 2008, AASL received close to 7,000 responses from every area of the United States, with public library and elementary school libraries making up nearly 60 percent of the total responses. Half of responding schools said the average copyright year for health and medicine information is 1995; the expenditure per-student median, $12.06, is only two-thirds of the cost of a single work of fiction ($17.63, according to the March 1, 2008 issue of School Library Journal), and about a third of the cost of a single nonfiction title ($27.04); school library media programs (SLMP) at schools in the central cities and suburbs of metropolitan areas average 54.3 hours of total SLMP staffing, compared with 50.8 hours for schools in outlying towns and rural areas. The complete 2008 report is available on the AASL Website.
