GEN: Bookmobiles to charter schools?

[Eugene Hainer <Hainer_G@CDE.STATE.CO.US>]

LMNETers:
A prominent local (public) library person and school library supporter has
raised an interesting issue.  I toss it out to you for comment, and
hopefully some first hand experience.  In Colorado, almost none of the
charter schools have a school library, relying instead on services through
the local district or, typically, the public library.  Nothing new there,
I'm sure.

The proposal made to address this is to look into encouraging charter
schools to establish cooperatively funded school library bookmobiles.
Ideally, the bookmobile itself would come from grant or bond money. The
operations could be split among the existing charter schools.  There are
certainly issues about curricular support. (WHICH curriculum, when each
charter school is unique?) But given that some library is better than none,
and given that public libraries simply cannot perform the function of
curricular support as well as a dedicated school library can, this might be
a partial solution.

An ERIC search on the topic turned up some mention of school-bookmobile
service, but nothing very recent. Money aside, I can see the merits, but is
it just "books" that we LMS want to provide, or is it "services"? Could one
person provide both to an entire school on a weekly basis?  And, knowing
the difficulties mentioned in this list about working with one faculty,
could one reasonably expect to work *effectively* with multiple faculties
when seeing them only one or a few days a week? Is this a step back into
the pre-school-library , or an idea whose time has come (again)? Is it
worth pursuing funding, or is it best left alone?

What are YOUR thoughts? Are you aware of anything like this being done with
success (or not) for non-public schools?  Please address your comments to
me, and I'll -->HIT them back to the list if/when sufficient commentary is
generated.  Thanks...
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Eugene  Colorado State Library:                 Voice: 303-866-6730
Hainer  School Library Media Dev.               fax: 303-866-6940
                201 E. Colfax/Denver 80203              Hainer_G@cde.state.co.us

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