Last Friday, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) announced the 2018 candidates for AASL President-Elect.

As quoted in the announcement, “I am honored to be invited to run for the position of AASL President-Elect. If elected, I will conscientiously facilitate the work of our professional association and serve with passion and purpose to ensure a leadership role for school librarians and libraries in the literacy ecosystem of today and tomorrow.”

AASL has been my professional home since I started my Master’s degree program way back in 19XX. 😉 I was well schooled in the critical importance of our national organizations ALA and AASL as essential to the effectiveness and success of my own practice of librarianship. Our associations continue to give us a national voice while they support our efforts for continual growth and development at the building and district levels as well.

I am in the process of constructing my campaign wiki. While putting together information for the Bio page, I reflected on some of the most empowered opportunities I have had to serve our national associations. After nearly three decades of involvement, I have served in many capacities and reaped many benefits. These are just a few of the highlights.

•  Serving as an elementary school librarian during the exciting years of the National Library Power Project set my course as a collaborating educator committed to building effective classroom-library instructional partnerships (1993-1997).

•  I had the amazing opportunity to serve on AASL’s @your library® Committee from 2002-2004. Through this experience, I developed an understanding of advocacy and made lifelong librarian colleagues and friends across the country.

•  In 2008-2009, I served as the chair of AASL School Librarian’s Role in Reading Task Force. We created a toolkit and drafted the Position Statement on the School Librarian’s Role in Reading that was adopted by the AASL Board and was included in Empowering Learners: Guidelines for School Library Programs (AASL 2009).

•  I served on the 2009-2010 Pura Belpré Book Award Committee, a year during which our committee had only 36 titles to consider. This experience solidified my commitment to diversity in library collections and in advocating for increasing diversity in children’s and young adult literature publishing.

•  Throughout my career, I’ve had many opportunities to collaborate with outstanding public library children and teen librarians. I am pleased to be a current member of AASL’s Interdivisional School-Public Library Cooperation Committee. Representatives from AASL, ALSC, and YALSA serve on the committee. We have created a soon-to-be-published toolkit that demonstrates and support collaboration among librarians who serve young people.

Clearly, serving on AASL and ALSC committees has been a rich source of professional learning for me.

2018 School Libraries Resolution
As noted in last week’s post, I made this resolution for 2018:

In 2018, I resolve to marshal a sense of urgency to support empowered school librarians and strengthen school librarianship by growing and sharing my passion, experience, knowledge, skills, and service to maximize our leadership and help our profession reach its capacity to transform teaching and learning in our schools.

I actually wrote this resolution before accepting the invitation to stand for the position of AASL President-Elect. If it’s possible to be even more committed to this resolution, I am!

AASL announced all of the candidates who are running for the Executive Board and other association positions in 2018. Please learn about all of the candidates and exercise your right to vote as a member of the only national association for school librarians.

Thank you.