Purpose
This project gives you, the potential media specialist, experience in thinking about program planning and evaluation.  It is the primary avenue through which you will demonstrate your knowledge of effective management policies, procedures, and principles.  It shows your ability to develop a plan for the library media program, a key LMS competency.  This assignment is one of the major assessments ("Big Eight") required for certification.

In many school systems, media specialists are required annually to write some kind of planning and evaluation document.  Whether required or not, it pays to have a plan in place.  Such a plan, if well conceived and ratified by the Media Committee, helps to focus the media program and enhance its effectiveness.

Your plan should be written in relation to a specific media program, which you must describe.  Write a plan based upon this program and its needs.  This description can be authentic or fictional, but an authentic situation is strongly recommended. 

Components

The first set of elements describe the school library media program as it is now.

1. School description: demographics, size, staff, grade levels, special education services, rural/urban/suburban, plus anything else you think is important to share. It must be sufficiently detailed to provide enough context for evaluation of the plan.

2. School mission and/or goals: most schools have adopted a mission statement, a slogan, and/or annual goals. Some schools use missions outlined by their districts. Sometimes, schools have goals that must be met for Adequate Yearly Progress.  Find out what these elements are, because you should anchor every program goal to a school goal, AYP goal, or the school mission.

3. Philosophy: describe the media center’s educational philosophy and the purpose of the media center.  This portion should actually be your own philosophy of media service and mission, and/or a negotiated philosophy developed by the group.  Clearly express your position on the purpose of the media center; providing access to information; the need to provide a conducive climate to learning; and the proactive connection of your media program to the local learning community and beyond.

4. Mission statement:  summarize and condense the media center’s philosophy into a single action statement - no more than one sentence in length.  Some schools have T-shirt sized logos that serve this purpose well.

5. Service overview: briefly describe the menu of services offered by your LMP, explicitly including the following. This section should describe services as they are now.

• Circulation policy for students, staff, and parents - which may differ for each kind of patron, and for different grade levels
• Scheduling: hours of operation, and how you schedule (addressing flexible/open access)
  
• Services: list here programming and services already in place, including services for diverse patrons (including disabilities), and services for teachers and staff.
• Ethics and legal principles: write a section that describes services you offer in support of intellectual property rights (copyright), ethical information use, intellectual freedom, and patron confidentiality (privacy).  Address the ethical information behavior expected of your students. Freely reference professional documents and other authoritative resources; I do not expect you to reproduce the copyright laws here.
  
• Known weaknesses: based on analysis of evaluation data, describe possible areas of improvement. If you list a weakness here, it does not mean that you must write a goal to improve this weakness.
  

6. Facilities:  demonstrate your knowledge of the relationship of facility to program needs. Describe the facility as it is now, including an analysis of the overall learning climate.  Include virtual elements, such as an OPAC available to students at home and a video distribution system. You may want to include a floor plan and/or pictures to enhance your description.  What changes need to be made to improve facilities? What barriers exist between learners and equitable access to resources and services? Is the library media environment conducive to learning? Show evidence that you will explore facility issues annually and plan toward remedying problems you might find.  Plan adequate space for individuals, small groups, and whole classes.    If no improvement is needed, state this clearly and provide supporting evidence. In our current atmosphere of security concerns, I don't recommend that you upload a floor plan online.

7. Budget sources: name current sources of funds and state any formulas that apply (such as dollar amount per FTE). Include typical fundraising efforts such as book fairs and any local supplements.  Evaluate the adequacy of funding for the program based on current needs.

8. Media Committee:  how is it chosen? Who sits on this committee?  When does it meet?  What does it do?  This committee should provide an opportunity to collaborate with teachers and administrators to develop a library media program plan that aligns resources, services, and information literacy standards with the school's goals and objectives.

9. Personnel:  provide job descriptions for media center personnel. The role of the media specialist should be briefly covered here or in the Philosophy section.  Will you use volunteers or student aides?   You must apply accepted management principles and practices that relate to personnel issues.  If there are multiple media specialists, describe how responsibilities are divided.

The remaining elements describe your plans for the future.

10. Long-range goals: based on analysis of the program described above, design at least 4 goals for improvement, written to be accomplished over a 5-year span.  Give a short rationale for each goal, referencing Information Power or some other authority.  These goals must connect to the school's mission and student achievement.  Overall, your goals should align resources, services, and information literacy standards with the school's goals and objectives. Goals should demonstrate a proactive (rather than passive) role in the overall school mission.  They should be derived through collaboration with teachers and administrators. They may be based on existing problems discovered through program evaluation and data collection. They should address specific needs of the library media program, such as collection development and maintenance.

11. Short-range goals (or objectives):  in order to accomplish the long range goals, list component goals that can be worked on over the next year.  Some long-range goals may not be addressed by these short-range goals.  Short-range goals must relate logically to the long-range goals.  If the relationship is not obvious, provide a rationale. Goals (short- and long-range) must align with your philosophy and mission statement.  Together with the long-range goals, you must apply accepted management principles and practices that relate to personnel, financial, and operational issues.  These short-range goals should have measurable outcomes.

12. Budgeting Plan:  In percentages, how will you divide your money for the next fiscal year to accomplish your goals?    Again, your budget design should demonstrate good management practices as outlined in IP.  This is one key way that you will align resources with school learning goals.  If your budget is woefully inadequate, you may choose to write a goal related to fundraising or proactive lobbying for better funding.  It should be generally clear what money will be spent on.  It is unacceptable to plan a budget based on spending categories - such as Books, Supplies, Periodicals, AV, etc.  These are functional accounting categories that you must address eventually, but not in this PDEP (because they are useless in terms of goal setting and program planning).

13. A plan for planning and evaluation:  describe your annual review process, to include program evaluation and strategic planning.  How will you know when your goals are met? What data will be collected?  Make sure goals are mapped to evaluation strategies and that data are used for decision-making.  Who decides what needs to be done, and when?  Sketch an annual time line that allows you to create a plan in time to spend money on schedule.

14. Overarching themes:  your PDEP should provide evidence of the following overarching principles of school library service. These principles support all the elements of your Plan. Allude to each of these in at least one place. It's not reasonable to specify where they should appear, because they could naturally occur in your philosophy, goals, or other places. Your Plan should show that you are actively working to attain these ideals.

• Equitable and pervasive access to information, resources, and services
  
• Flexible and open access for the MC and its services  (if not attainable right now, how will you work toward it?)
• Compliance with legal and ethical codes of the profession, and communication of them to your learning community
• Constructive learning environment supporting the school's learning goals
  
• Beyond the walls: integration of the media program with the school, the learning community, and the outside world.  Two mandatory activities related to this are participation on one or more committees beyond the Media Committee and an active staff development program.

Read each section above very carefully.  Every sentence is important.

You may include any other components that you need to support the required parts of your plan.  For example, you may decide to use a spreadsheet printout to illustrate your budget, or a floor plan to describe a facilities problem.

Professional associations: You are required to "recognize the role of other educational professionals and professional associations."  This is easily done by a.) incorporating educators of other job descriptions into your planning process and by drawing upon their expertise; b.) liberally using AASL policy statements, GLMA work, and work of other professional organizations.

Submission format: Please submit one hard copy of your plan per team in paper form (stapled or spiral bound). I love front-back printing in projects stapled like a book (in part, to save paper). Please number pages and clearly label sections, highlighting or bolding required elements.  In addition, post the project on each team member's assignment page.  Print one copy of the rubric, and self-assess.

Acronyms: Use as you see fit to keep from repeating multi-term nouns. See the rubric for a listing.

Peer review is recommended, as always! Your score will almost certainly be higher if you take time to obtain peer review. This time, you need show no evidence of peer review due to the time line.

Tags: Use the provided list. This helps you to identify components, and it helps evaluators find them.  Make sure that tags match the definitions of elements listed here and in the rubric. A common problem in the past has been mismatching, and not carefully and fully interpreting the competency statements in the rubric.