- Target:
- Wangenheim Middle School Leadership and SDUSD School Board
- Region:
- United States of America
Parents, educators and students across Mira Mesa are calling upon our principal to have full-time access to a school library and a certified teacher librarian.
It is our hope that community voices can help reverse the trend of serious reductions to our school library program by calling on our leaders to ensure that our teacher librarian, library programs and technology training are no longer at risk. It is our wish that our children and their teachers have full and equal access to the literacy and collaborative opportunities provided by our school libraries and certified teacher librarians. It is our belief that independent reading, information literacy and the technology training facilitated in our school libraries are crucial to our children, and that the teacher librarian's knowledge of student ability allows them to place "just right books" into the hands of students, fostering a love of reading and life-long learning.
The U.S. Commission on Libraries and Information Science summarizes what decades of research have shown in state after state after state:
*Students in schools with good school libraries learn more, get better grades, and score higher on standardized test scores than their peers in schools without libraries.
*School Libraries have an important role in teaching. Certified teacher librarians are working with teachers to change what is possible in the classroom and support learning opportunities with books, computer resources and more.
*School libraries are critical for student achievement.
*School libraries are leading the way for technology use in schools and often serve as a second classroom.
*School libraries inspire literacy.
*School libraries need to be staffed by a certified teacher librarian in order to have a positive impact on student academic achievement. (http://www.nclis.gov)
To access an extensive list of research please see http://www.lrs.org/impact.php
http://www2.scholastic.com/content/collateral_resources/pdf/s/slw3_2008.pdf
"School library collections inform, educate,
entertain, and enrich students at all levels.…
When students are able
to… explore information that is meaningful to them, they not only learn faster but their literacy skills grow rapidly; they learn how to learn.”
—C. Beth Fitzsimmons, Ph.D.,
Chairman, NCLIS. Excerpted from a
letter to President George W. Bush,
February 13, 2006, introducing
School Libraries Work!
We are encouraged and hopeful that the leaders of Wangenheim Middle will review the research, consider the issues surrounding school library services, and will do what is necessary to see that our school library, teacher librarian and information technology receive adequate and sustained funding.
We, the undersigned, call upon Principal Lamont Jackson and the members of the San Diego Unified School District Board of Supervisors to ensure that Wangenheim Middle School students have full-time access to our school library and a certified teacher librarian to provide a competitive education in information technology and literacy.
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