NLLD 2018

Part of my responsibilities as Legislative Chair for SCASL is to attend the National Library Legislative Day in Washington, DC in May.
I know from attending in previous years that it means more to bring my students' voices to the legislators than my own. I'm amplifying my students' voices by bringing "Why I Love My Library" postcards. I shared the template with our state librarian listserv and I have responses from 8 different school of all levels in different parts of our state. They are really sweet.
I created a Fligrid for student videos responses to the same prompt. You can see it here. I have videos from five different schools. I've selected some of my favorites to feature. I created a QR code to the videos on a card that I'll be sharing with the legislative offices. I made the background in Canva and inserted the QR code, then I printed on cardstock to take with me.



Finally, I had an idea inspired by Flat Stanley. I'm going to be taking nine books with me to DC. One from each of our districts plus two for our Senators. I'm going to be documenting the book's journey to DC and to the legislator's offices. There I'll be asking the staff (we usually meet with staff, not the legislator) if they'll have the legislator sign the book then mail back (I'll provide stamped, addressed envelopes). Because we meet with staff, I thought this might be a good way to have something go in front of the legislator himself and he'll at least here that school librarians came and have us on his mind. It will also be fun for the students to watch the journey and learn about government, their legislators, and how advocacy and lobbying work.
I opened this up on our library listserv and had volunteers from each district send a book to me. I've enjoyed seeing which books they selected to make the journey. I'll post pictures on Twitter and write an update after the NLLD event on May 7-8.