I was saddened to read this article today in the New York Times, about a neighborhood school with forty percent of the children receiving free lunch that was struggling to save its school library. By digging deep and rallying their community the students of PS 363 in New York City raised the money to save their library and keep their school library program going for another year.
I am lucky enough to live in a district with reasonably well-funded schools, due to a referendum that passed a few years ago. This allows the schools to offer a school library program staffed with professional school librarians not just during the year but also for several days during the summer. The article in the Times notes that while diversity is considered to be a benefit of a public school education, cuts in education are creating casualties in schools like PS 363 (aka The Neighborhood School), where the socioeconomic diversity is enough to make fundraising efforts difficult, but not quite extreme enough to qualify for extra federal funding.
We’ll never escape the inequities of school funding. Some schools will have extraordinary resources available to them, and others will struggle. One way to even the playing field is to make sure that schools like PS 363 have great school library programs staffed by professional librarians- there are strong correlations to significant improvements in student achievement and literacy, for kids at all socioeconomic levels (you can check out Scholastic’s excellent report summarizing the research here– the school also has a link to the report on their fundraising webpage). Where is the money going to come from? PS 363 showed that supporting vital, if unfunded, educational programs requires a community effort. It is amazing to me how the school community and surrounding neighborhood pulled together and saved the library program for another year. The only way it’s going to happen is if each of us gets personally involved in saving an imperiled school library, regardless of the situation the students, and school, find themselves in.
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