News from Library Supervisors Roundtable

Yesterday I attended the LMS Leadership Roundtable and want to pass along the information.

Position shortages
The shortages of certified LMS have led to many districts filling positions with candidates going through the PACE program. PACE hire-ees (my word & I like it) no longer have to have a Masters in Library Science and the course requirement has been lowered to 24 hours (with only 9 required from USC Lib School). PACE is easier on the districts/candidates that can not afford the internship since there is no internship required nor the PRAXIS. Much discussion was held and the Roundtable as well as all LMS need to hold conversations with anyone who can create any/all of the following changes.
A. The state department - the requirements for the PACE program need to be more in line with the background and training that the job necessitates
B. The USC School of Lib. Science - this program needs to be much more flexible with indistrict internships and inschool mentoring internships
C. The state department - the office of Teacher Certification needs to recognize the growing shortage of LMS and look at accepting/promoting a Bachelor of Science degree with emphasis of Library Science

Library Supervisors Roundtable (SCASA)
Apparently SCASA recently said that there is no such entity. This roundtable was formed initially for communication and credibility. The group will continue to meet and a committee was formed to petition SCASA to recognize this group as a subgroup of SCASA.

External Review (Someone please edit this for clarification - my notes are fuzzy here - ER of what?? SACS?? NCLB??)
For the 2007-2008 year only the first 3 of the 8 target indicators will remain, but no benchmark standards will be included. The 3 indicators cover collaboration, size & age of collection, and flexible scheduling. A future concern is that the size & age target indicator will be omitted because it does not tie to legislation and is not funded. M. Alewine felt that we are fortunate to have the 3 indicators remain included and not to have lost all indicators in the wave so has not made much noise on this. Remember the whole point of ERT is to look at ways to improve student achievement.

Funding
School libraries are back in the 07-08 General Assembly budget request. The one million dollar request is not a line item, but a special allocation. It was noted that this amount will not go far statewide, but the funding was last approved in 1999.

The $25/student funding (= 1book/student) is still in discussion in the Education Oversight Committee. This money, if approved, will be specifically for print resources and not technology.

Data Collection
This will be the buzz topic for school administrators next year, especially tying data to test scores. LMS are encouraged to use MAPS scores to determine the impact their programs have/can have on student achievement.

SCASL Conference
Both the March 2007 and 2008 SCASL Conferences will be held in Columbia. The group signed a 2 year contract with the convention center.

School Advisory Committees
As more and more books are challenged, you are encouraged to develop a School Advisory Committee to work with you on collection choices.

SPATIAL - New Student Association
Apparently there used to be a student association (again help me out here someone - it sounded like schlossa??) that was parallel to FBLA or HOSA. There is interest in SCASL helping to develop SPATIAL that focuses on Information Science. The group would include student assistants and anyone interested in the field itself. A service component would be a major focus in the program. SPATIAL - Student Professional Association of Technology Information And Library Sciences

Martha Alewine's Blog
You may want to add Martha's blog to your list. www.scschoollibraries.blogspot.com

Speaking of Blogs
Remember, instead of going to each one of the blogs you like in order to check to see if anything new has been posted, have Bloglines do this for you! Bloglines will keep up with what you've viewed on ALL of the blogs you subscribe to and give you all of the updates to all of the blogs in one place. Then you just check one place ( http://www.bloglines.com/ ) to get the new stuff. If you are really sweet, maybe Cathy Nelson will share her blogroll with you - that will give you a bunch of Media Center blogs and Ed Tech blogs and you can add your favorites to them and delete the ones you don't want.

The Library Supervisors Roundtable will meet again in January.