Fellows Erin Downey and Carol Robinson Impact ESSA Implementation in Idaho

Lilead Fellows Erin Downey and Carol Robinson, of Boise School District and Orofino Joint School District #171 respectively, have been working to draft and provide recommendations for Idaho’s ESSA draft. Recently, they attended feedback sessions with Idaho’s Department of Education, and worked with their state library association and local and national policy advisors to advocate at the Governor’s office, the State Department of Education, the State Board of Education, the school superintendents’ association, and the school administrators’ association.

Next, Erin and Carol will be soliciting people from these groups to help draft a definition of effective school library programs that includes a certified librarian, paraprofessional assistant, and access to current, relevant, diverse collections. In the future, they will be reaching out to superintendents and school administrators to assist in ESSA implementation.

Erin and Carol exemplify the purpose of the Lilead Project: to empower, enable, and equip library leaders to bring about change and enable school library programs to truly make a difference in the lives of all members of their school communities!


Erin DowneyErin Downey is the District Consulting Librarian at Boise School District in Boise, Idaho, where she is working to increase professional capacity of BSD’s 64 library staff members to support state learning and literacy initiatives. She is an active member of the Library Leadership Advisory Committee (LiLAC), a joint endeavor of the Idaho Commission for Libraries and the Idaho Library Association, and blogs for the Discovery Educators Network Leadership Council. You can find her on twitter at @ehdowney.

Carol RobinsonCarol Robinson is the District Librarian for Joint School District#171 in Orofino, Idaho. She taught secondary English for four years and then taught elementary library for five years and secondary library for nine years.  In order to do this effectively, she received her teaching credential in English from University of California, Irvine and her second, specialist teaching credential in library media and also a Masters in Education with an option in school librarianship from Cal State, Long Beach. With 18 years of teaching experience, she then decided to apply for the Lilead Fellows Program.  She represents the smallest district in the program with a mere 1,000 students; her district is located in north, central Idaho.

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