The Premier’s Reading Challenge

Is your family participating in the Premier’s Reading Challenge (the PRC)?
This year we are asking families to take a more direct role in organising their own participation.
Our school will not be registering as a school to participate in the PRC in 2006. This decision has not been taken lightly. Our decision to boycott the challenge is a result of the government’s refusal to address several issues which directly affect teacher-librarians and the students they teach.
Teacher-librarians, through the Teachers’ Federation have been attempting to negotiate a resolution to these issues. You can access the complete log of claims on the Internet at
http://www.nswtf.org.au/journal_extras/tllink.html

Two major issues are the use of teacher-librarians for ‘Release From Face To Face’ (RFF) teaching, and the inequity in the teacher-librarian staffing schedule.

The teacher-librarian staffing allocation is unfortunately based on the number of children in support classes, not the number of classes that exist in that school. Because the number of students with special needs in support classes is small, and no consideration or recognition is given in the staffing schedule to support their classes, as classes, the teacher-librarian allocation is sometimes reduced.

This means that two schools can have the same number of classes,
but one of them may have their teacher-librarian for a day less
purely because some of their classes are for children with special needs.

The government has known about this inequity for at least ten years and simply refuses to rectify it.

Schools can also use their teacher-librarian to provide RFF for classroom teachers. Teacher-librarians are information professionals and should be working with classroom teachers to develop and extend our children’s information literacy skills. Teacher-librarians should not be used to provide RFF.

The PRC demands a lot of extra work to administer and no extra time or support is provided to do this. Until the government treats teacher-librarians and their students equitably and fairly we have decided we cannot do this administration for them.

However

You can register as a family and organise your own participation. We will help you access books on the list, as will our local library. You can register in February 2006. Simply go to

http://www.schools.nsw.edu.au/premiersreadingchallenge/

and follow the links or contact them.

Enquiries about the Premier's Reading Challenge can be made by phone, fax or email.

(phone)
9886 7199 
(fax)
9886 7654 
(email)

Information provided by Adrienne Tunnicliffe, Teacher-librarian, Beaumont Road Public School

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