Saturday, November 11, 2017

#NYLA2017 : Recruit, Retain, Repeat...Again

Barbara Stripling and Jill Hurst-Wahl

This was a continuation of the discussion begun last year at the conference on recruiting people - especially K-12 teachers - who would like to become school media specialists (a.k.a. school librarians).  In NYS, there continues to be a shortage of school media specialists.  Every school media students is able to get a full-time job as a school librarian before graduation!  The question is how can we (the LIS/school media graduate programs) attract more students who are interested in this career option?  The answers are complex.

After a lively discussion, we invited each person to decide what s/he would do over the next eight months (in other words, before fall 2018) to recruit someone into the profession.  We asked that when a person does what s/he promised to do, that the person post the "what" and the result (if appropriate) on the NYLA/SSL Facebook page.

By the way, the need to recruit more people to become school librarians exists in other U.S. states. 

No comments: