Budgeting is Advocacy

Much of the information in this post was gleaned from an informative session led by Dr. Sandra Andrews, Director of Instructional Technology & Media Services for Lincoln County Schools. I attended her session at Gaston County School's Summer Media Institute earlier this month. You can find Dr. Andrew's blog at Dr. A's Comments on the Digital World. Resources from her presentation are at Power of Data.

Budgeting truly is advocacy or, in other words, you won't get what you don't ask for. It's a simple task really; find the money and ask for it. I know that you are thinking there is no way they will give me what I want. My response to that is, "How do you know?" Even if you have submitted requests in the past and they have been turned down, the answer may change at any time. More money could be coming in. Someone may have retired. Hey, maybe your principal had some really great coffee that morning. You really never know what is going to change.

So what do you ask for? Hopefully you have a collection development policy already so you have something to work with. If not, do that first. Look at your school & your community. Analyze them & figure out what makes them tick. What kind of people live there? What education do they have? How much money do they make? You can't know what people need without knowing who they are first. 

Once you have that, move on to creating a plan for what you will buy. I looked at major gaps in my collection, figured up how many books I needed for each section this year & multiplied that by $20. That really isn't the correct number to use because it isn't the average cost of a book but it's easy to multiply & gives nice round numbers. If you want to use real numbers, you can look here: SLJ's Average Book Prices.

I factored in a loss of 2% on my collection that would need funding to replace which ended up being $4,000 for my collection of about 10,000. I also listed what I would like to spend on replacing my old, ugly, rusty metal shelving each year. Since I had the information on what I was given last year, I included that & subtracted that amount from my total to give anyone reading it an idea of what my deficit is. This is my very simple budget that I shared with my principal & PTO president Proposed Budget 2014-2015. When I sent it, I let them know they could share the document with anyone they wanted.

This is obviously a work in progress & I plan to add to it to create a 5 year plan. This budget was submitted as soon as I created it but I plan to revise & resubmit in Dec/Jan as this is when principals and others are looking at how to spend monies for the following school year.

Now, getting down to the advocacy part of this blog is simple. When people see how you are spending your money or how you would spend money if you had it, they realize what you are doing and how important it is or could be. My budget is simple at present because I am just starting it but I imagine it will blossom into a document that evolves with me. Have faith and ask for what will make your library spectacular. They might not give you the full amount but you never know!