Staffing is an important but also problematic area for the school librarian

1. Staffing is an important but also problematic area for the school librarian

2. Funding may be allocated elsewhere and staffing the library may be a distant second to other district policies

3. Developing job descriptions and evaluative tools for assessing staff become important tasks for school librarians

4. This assignment is meant to help you start thinking about staffing • Job titles • Job descriptions • Evaluative tools

5. In this assignment: • You are the school librarian of a 1000 student high school in Northern Kentucky • You have one para-professional staff member, 10 student workers (throughout the day), and occasional parent-volunteers. • Develop a job description for your staff along with an evaluation tool (and policy) for each.

6. Develop the management tools and justify how you came up with the policies in your assignment.

7. Staffing the school library consists of: • defining personnel needs • securing qualified personnel • developing staff competencies to perform essential tasks • establishing standards of performance • evaluating personnel performance

8. One of the most important tasks is to make sure that staff members are working with a common goal and a common vision.

9. Staff expect their supervisor to direct their actions to complete tasks in a satisfactory manner

10. Job responsibilities and evaluation tools must be defined and understood to be clear and equitable

11. Job descriptions may or may not be defined by the librarian but they are generally involved in the hiring process

12. Thus, the school librarian needs to understand various staff roles to establish expectations and responsibilities

13. For this assignment, you do not have to create these documents

14. Find documents you like and what will work for your situation

15. However – be able to justify why you are using a document

16. Do not copy documents without giving credit to their original author(s)

17. The evaluation tool needs to dovetail with the job descriptions used or created

18. To summarize: • Describe your library for the reader • Create your job description(s) based on your library's staff/personnel needs • Create your evaluation tools

19. Policies always make more sense when they address a particular issue or need.

20. This exercise is to get you thinking about your library, its staffing needs, and how you will define and assess those needs.