Hello All,
As I get ready to leave for the summer, I wanted to give the group a heads
up about an experience I had toward the end of this year. Our board of
education contracted with a group named NEOLA which provides policies and
forms for school districts and puts them in an electronic format with
indexing so that they are easily accessible to staff and parents from the
school web site. Unfortunately, some of the policies are rather generic and
not as thorough as what we had previously. To make a long story short, I
found, quite by accident, that one area that was totally changed was the
Library Materials Selection Policy. The new one was very short, and
basically sounded like a textbook policy, but even more alarming, it said I
would merely take suggestions from teachers, order the materials, and let
them know when they were in! Neither I, or the other library media
specialist in our district, had even been told that the professional
selection policy that I had co-authored several years ago had been replaced.
Furthermore, today I received a new job description with my contract for
next year. It appears to be from the same group, and it doesn't even
mention materials selection as one of my duties!
I urge each of you to check with your school district before you also find
that important documents are suddenly replaced with ones that you may find
inferior to what you had in place before. According to NEOLA, they work
with school districts in Florida, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan,
Wisconsin, and West Virginia. Of course they may branch out to other states
as well. It looks as though they will work with local districts to
customize the documents, but you must be on top of this before your
administration settles for the generic document without being aware that it
might cause a problem.
I have re-written a proposed policy that I submitted today. I will update
you in the fall to let you know how it comes out. I have not signed off
LM_NET for the summer yet, so feel free to respond if you have questions.
Thanks for all of the help this year. I look forward to a positive result!
Cynthia Gulden
Library Media Specialist
Tecumseh High School
New Carlisle, OH
tl_cgulden@k12server.mveca.org
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