The Lamb and Johnson (2012) article made me think about Library budgets through a different lens.
Collaborator: To manage the budget it is important to collaborate with students and staff, as the library must serve the teaching and learning needs of the school community. In order to build and maintain a culture of reading, it is important that students have a voice in their library’s collection, and must create opportunities to collaborate with students to build the collection. We must also actively create opportunities to speak with fellow teachers about their curriculum resource needs to ensure that students have access to the best quality resources with which to research and complete their assessments. We have teachers and heads of department often requesting books and digital subscriptions so that must be factored into the budget as well. We also have staff members from all departments (including accounts) requesting fiction books for our ‘adult’ collection. This is an important collection as it encourages a culture of reading.
Steward: In my previous context I managed the Library budget, which was new to me. Thankfully I had the incredible support of the previous Library Manager who showed me how she accounted for every cent. The budget was incredibly tight so we needed to be extremely organised and ensure that all monies were spent by the term 4. We also had to raise more money through Book Fairs and Scholastic Book Club. Every purchase had to be thoroughly researched beforehand, as we could not to afford to purchase any ‘duds’. As a team, we needed to show that we were competent budget managers by ensuring that we did not go over budget, spent our budget down to the last dollar, and were able to provide excellent and useful resources for year levels P-12. This was a major challenge!
Thinker: This is an interesting one! In my previous context, I was initially given a budget that was woefully insufficient. I wrote a Three Year Plan for a budget that I would expect for the size of the school and how the budget would be spent, including on digital resources. This was successful as the budget was increased significantly. In my current context, the library is a priority so the budget is sufficient. It can be crucial to show the Senior Leadership Team the research demonstrating the correlation between library budgets and learning outcomes, NAPLAN results etc.
Sometimes we need to think outside the box to channel more monies. In my previous context, just before budgets closed I contacted heads of departments and asked if they had money left over that they could channel towards the Library. We could easily justify the expenditure – for example the English budget had leftover money so we purchased fiction books for the Wide Reading Program. The Academic Support team had money left over in their budget so we purchased Dyslexic font texts. In this way we were collaborators, stewards and thinkers all rolled into one!
Reference:
Lamb, A. & Johnson, H.L. (2012). Program administration: Budget management. The School Library Media Specialist. http://eduscapes.com/sms/administration/budget.html.