School Library Month, ALA Elections, & More!

By Kathy Lester, AASL President 2022-2023 on 03/17/2023 • ( 0 )

I love School Library Month! School Library Month is a wonderful opportunity to focus on all the great things going on in my school library and all the school libraries across the nation and CELEBRATE! Including stakeholders in this celebration is an easy way to advocate for our profession. The Michigan Association of School Librarians always reaches out to our governor for a proclamation declaring April as School Library month in Michigan. We have our proclamation from our governor for April of 2023 and we will be referring to this as we ask our state department of education, school boards, administrators, and others to join in our celebration! We will also be using it as we meet with legislators on Michigan Library Advocacy day on April 25, 2023.

The AASL School Library Event Promotion Committee has updated resources available at https://www.ala.org/aasl/advocacy/slm. The AASL March Town Hall featured the School Library Month Event Promotion Committee chair Carolyn Vibbert and members Heather Hornor, Natasha Carty, Fallon Farokhi, Lovie Howell who highlighted the theme “Celebrate With Us!” and discussed with Town Hall attendees ideas for celebrating with administrators, teachers, and students and for celebrating ourselves! {With the challenging times we’ve been facing, we all certainly deserve a bit of celebrating each other and ourselves!} You can watch the recording of the Town Hall “Celebrate School Library Month” by going to: https://www.ala.org/aasl/about/townhall and clicking on “View archived town halls”.

The AASL School Library Event Promotion Committee is also putting together resources to help us celebrate and acknowledge other events with our students. For instance, there are resources in March for Women’s History Month and Freedom of Information Day (March 16). In April there will be resources for Drop Everything and Read Day (April 12) and Money Smart Week (April 15-21). Check out all of the resources at: http://www.ala.org/aasl/promotional.

Another new resource, that we can use in our advocacy work, are 18 new administrator videos. These videos highlight administrators from the AASL School Leader Collaborative speaking about all of the great things happening in school libraries. There are short segments covering topics such as EDI, collaboration, engagement, literacy, leadership, etc. You can embed these videos in your website, or your presentations, or share them across social media. You can find these videos at: http://www.ala.org/aasl/playlist/admin

I also wanted to remind everyone about the upcoming ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom (OIF) Webinar sponsored by AASL on March 22, 2022, at 6 pm central. The topic is Managing Challenges with Our School Policies and the Law and will feature Freedom to Read attorney Theresa Chmara. This is a “do not miss” webinar and registration is complimentary for all. If you cannot attend, by registering you will receive notice and access to the recording. Register at: http://bit.ly/OIFaasl.

Finally, a reminder to vote in the upcoming ALA and AASL elections. There are amazing candidates for our AASL elections. These candidates have been highlighted in KQ blogs over the past week. You can find the posts here: https://knowledgequest.aasl.org/author/jlucas_ldc/. In addition, there are many school librarians and school library educators running for ALA Council. You can find information about ALA Council candidates here: https://www.ala.org/news/press-releases/2022/11/ala-nominating-committee-announces-councilors-large-candidates and here: https://www.ala.org/news/press-releases/2023/01/ala-announces-slate-petition-council-candidates. It is important to have school librarians on ALA Council to represent our unique needs within the library ecosystem. Ballot emailing began on March 13th and the election will close on April 5, 2023. PLEASE VOTE! Let’s break records and have AASL be the ALA Division with the highest number of voters! If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at kathylester.lib@gmail.com.