Roper S.

Key C.
Benton S.
10/19/18
FRIT 7331: Leadership of the School Library Media Program
Key Assessment

Budget Sources:

The bulk of funding for the school media center comes from Georgia’s QBE mandates (Quality
Basic Education Act), which bases funding on FTE (full-time student enrollment) numbers.
While QBE funding accounts for 57% of the district’s revenues, Muscogee County School
District (MCSD) is a Strategic Waiver school, meaning they have the flexibility to allocate funds
differently than the state’s FTE allocation formula requires (Lewis, 2018):

# of students FTE x FY2019 Weight x FTE ‘Base’ Amount = FTE AMOUNT

Note: The Base Amount $2,541.56 is set by our State Legislature. The FTE Base
Amount changes annually.
The weights for elementary school students vary from just over one (1.0323 for upper
elementary, grades four and five) to 2.0496 for kindergarten early intervention (GADOE,
FY2019 FTE, 2019).

The school’s media center serves 708 students and has state funding for the salary of one media
specialist, which does not come out of the school media center’s budget.

While the state funds are given to the school district pay for all media specialists’ salaries and
materials for all media centers in the district, the money is lumped in with all of the funds
allocated to each school, then allocated to school departments by their principals at their
discretion.

Some additional funds come from the PTA, donations, and fundraisers, but these usually account
for less than several hundred dollars per year.

The total budget for the media center is $9,000, or $12.71 per student at the school:

$9,000.00 / 708 students = $12.71/student

If anything other than books are purchased, the media specialist must put in a purchase order
request through the office. Additional items that are needed are bought from a different account,
which is part of a separate budget.

Technology is purchased through Title I funds. The goal of Muscogee County School District is
to be a 1:1 school by 2020. This year the principal made the decision to purchase several chrome
books with Title I money, and media center funds are being used for strictly books.
Current funding, while adequate to support the status quo, and adequate for expenditure on books
alone, is inadequate to support district, school, and media center goals, and inadequate to support
sustainable growth toward meeting and maintaining these goals and providing for future needs in
a technologically advancing 21st-Century learning environment.

Budgeting Plan

The following budgeting plan is based not only on Eagle Ridge ES’ two main school goals and
the goals of the school media center, but also on the Muscogee School District’s system-wideict
goals, with all three sets of goals being aligned in the budget.

The reason the district goals are included and aligned is that the budget is going to require a buy-
in from the district in order to meet its goals as well as those of the school, especially in terms of
the additional personnel expenditures that will be required to allow the media specialist to
perform duties critical to the meeting of these goals.

The impetus in education to “meet students where they are” is most evident in the technological
realm, especially with cellphones and social media, even at elementary school levels to some
extent, and most certainly with their parents. Their parents are online, and they are on their cell
phones. So, it makes sense logically to engage the parents and their students at the places they
are already engaged, but engaging them in the learning process.

By implementing a school-wide, and even better a system-wide platform through which students,
parents, and teachers can all communicate, learn, and produce while advancing technological
literacy, the educational system places itself in the 21st-Century modes of operating, and allows
all three of these stakeholders in education to interact with one another 24-hours a day on their
own terms, without time constraints.

Teachers will be able to confer about student work in a platform such as Microsoft Teams,
providing feedback and actually grading assignments online within the particular Team set up for
their class or grade level. This will be a welcome addition to the more-difficult-to-schedule face-
time conferring or using conferring notebooks.

Parents will be able to use Microsoft Teams, as well as other software purchased by the county,
perhaps the Office 365 Suite or Google Classroom software, to communicate with teachers in
much the same ways in which they use social media platforms like Facebook. They can
comment, add files, download or view PowerPoint presentations, and set up their own groups
within the platform for parents with students in the same age level, parents who carpool, parents
of students who need tutoring help, and anything else, all without having to leave their homes or
work locations to come to the school.

The district and school expenses will not only be in purchasing software licenses, but in the
important realm of the media specialist providing professional learning support to teachers,
students, and even parents. This time spent will be invaluable in terms of student achievement,
but will require an outlet of money for personnel to perform tasks in the media center, like
checking books in and out, reshelving, etc., while the media specialist serves as the facilitator of
technology professional development, including intensive collaboration with teachers both face-
to-face and in online collaborative environments.

Budgeting Plan for School Goal 1:

School Goal One: By May 2018, 100% of teachers will implement a system for conferring and
providing effective feedback in writing.
Goal met/not met: Not Met
Why/why not? All teachers implemented a system for conferring but were unable to provide
effective feedback because meeting with each student on a 7-10-day rotation was an unattainable
goal.
Supporting data: Student friendly rubrics, cross grade level meetings, PLC meetings,
documentation of conferring, 100% of teachers documented writing conferences using
conferring notebooks but wasn’t able to provide effective feedback on a 7-10-day rotation (Eagle
Ridge School Improvement Plan (SIP), 2018).

As we see in the above analysis of School Goal One for 2018 (done by the school itself before
the beginning of the 2018/2019 school year), the goal involving teachers implementing a system
for conferring and providing effective written feedback was not met, the reasoning being the
difficulty of meeting with every student under time constraints.

This can be aligned with District Goal Three: Focus on instructional practices critical to raising
achievement and reducing the achievement gap (previewing, a school-wide instructional
planning model, reading comprehension in all subjects and courses, writing across the
curriculum, and differentiated assignments with choice).

Timely feedback is certainly a large factor in raising student achievement, and a school-wide
instructional model that uses technology, rather than pen-and-paper “conferring notebooks,” can
help achieve that goal.

Budgeting Plan for School Goal 2:

School Goal Two: By May 2018, 85% of the staff will fully implement their training on how to
engage parents in an informal setting using Crucial Conversations.
Goal met/not met: Not Met
Why/why not?: While our family night activities were successful and well attended, there
continues to be a need to design and promote opportunities for home/school interaction focused
on student learning that will result in family participation.
Supporting data: Teacher surveys, grade level collaboration, communication logs, reflection
sheets, parent sign in sheets.
Again, just like School Goal One, School Goal Two concerning engaging parents in an informal
setting was not met because of the need to implement a system for promoting better home/school
communications on student learning that will increase family participation in that process. Just as
we did in helping solve the problem of more timely feedback for achieving school goal one, we
can apply a technological solution to the problems achieving school goal two. Parents will be
much more likely to participate in communication with the school if they can do it any time they
wish, via an online platform set up for them to use at their convenience, rather than at family
night events that require families to be at the school at a particular time on a certain date.

This goal, and its solution for achievement, can be tied to three of the Eagle Ridge Media
Center’s goals:
School Media Center Goal One (from School Media Center Mission Statement): Provide all
individuals in the school community the access to current technology and electronic resources
School Media Center Goal Three: Provide all individuals in the school community the access
21st century literacy skills
School Media Center Goal Four: Produce effective readers, researchers, thinkers who are both
producers and users of technology.

Budgeting Plan for School Media Center Goal 2:

School Media Center Goal Two: Provide all individuals in the school community the access to
current books
District Goal Two: Adopt district-wide secondary literacy and K-12 literacy and K-5 Math
instructional materials
District Goal Three: Focus on instructional practices critical to raising achievement and
reducing the achievement gap (previewing, a school-wide instructional planning model, reading
comprehension in all subjects and courses, writing across the curriculum, and differentiated
assignments with choice).

The budgeting plan above makes its case for the continuation of adequate funding for
maintaining an up-to-date collection of books to support both school media center and district
goals. This is the only one of the three categories of funding in our budget that is currently
adequately funded, and it equals 100% of the school media center’s budget: purchasing books.
Even in the technologic age we live in, a media center still serves the vital role of maintaining a
collection of up-to-date print materials that serve its population of learners.
 Projected Budget

MC Goal 2, District Goals

2, 3, 30%

School Goal 1, District

Goal 3, 40%

School Goal 2, MC Goals

1, 3, 4, 30%

School Goal 1, District Goal 3 School Goal 2, MC Goals 1, 3, 4 MC Goal 2, District Goals 2, 3
 References

Eagle Ridge School Improvement, SIP-Review-Presentation-18-19.pptx.

http://sites.muscogee.k12.ga.us/eagleridge/

GEORGIA DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION (GADOE) Office of Technology Services -

Technology Management
FY2019 FTE Data Collection Program Codes and Weights
(https://www.gadoe.org/Technology-Services/Data-
Collections/Documents/FTE%20Resources/FY2019/FY2019%20FTE%20Categories%20and%2
0Weights.pdf

Lewis, David F., Muscogee County Board of Education Superintendent’s Recommended General Fund
Budget FY2018 Public Budget Document July 1, 2017 – June 30, 2018
https://www.muscogee.k12.ga.us/Documents/Finance/Budgeting/FY%202018%20Public%20Bu
dget%20Document.pdf