Hello Everyone,

We are extending the deadline for completion of the School Author Visit
Survey to allow more people to respond. If you are a school librarian or
Ed. Tech responsible for programming in your library, we are looking for
your feedback!


School Author Visit Survey Request

We are seeking help with gathering information about author visits to
schools in Maine.  If you have hosted 20 authors or have never hosted an
author in your school, we are interested in your response!

Who is conducting this survey and why?

The Maine School Author Visit Grant is conducting this survey. As we begin
2023, we are in the process of evaluating the impact of the author visit
grant program.  Several years have passed since we last surveyed the school
community and we are interested in knowing if this grant is still meeting
schools’ needs. To help with the evaluation process, we created a new
survey and are gathering feedback from people involved with planning and
organizing school author visits.

Some history about the grant

The Maine School Author Visit grant was created in 2016 following
conversations with a group of school librarians and ed. techs and a few
Maine authors/illustrators.  To gather information from the broader Maine
school community, we also created and conducted a survey. The 2015 survey
received responses from 81 participants representing pre-k -12 schools from
all 16 counties in Maine.  Results were used to inform the grant guidelines
and were also shared with MASL.

The Maine School Author Visit grant currently provides an opportunity for
PreK-12 schools to apply for grants ranging between $500 - $800 to help
host authors who will share writing processes, story development and
research experiences.  Although many authors are amazing inspirational
speakers and have great messages to share, the grant’s intent is to
highlight the writing connection for students.   The hope is that meeting
authors and illustrators will help inspire students to read, write and/or
illustrate.

From 2016 - 2020, the grant was managed and hosted by the Onion Foundation.
As of June 2021 the Author Visit Grant separated from the foundation and
can now be found at Maine Literacy Fund <https://www.maineliteracyfund.org/>.
Over the past seven years, the fund has awarded 144 grants to over 75
schools across Maine.  We are hoping to continue and expand this
opportunity.

  Link to School Author Visit Survey
<https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/8HCY7T3>

The survey should take between 5 - 10 minutes to complete

and will close on February 7, 2023.


Please help spread the work by sharing this survey link with other
colleagues who are responsible for school library programming. If you have
any questions, please direct them to [log in to unmask]

We appreciate your participation with this data collection project!


Susan Onion

MLIS

(Grant manager: Maine School Author Visit Grant)

[log in to unmask]