Burbank City Council, school board like the idea of allowing school IDs to work at public libraries

Identification cards for Burbank Unified students may soon be usable at public libraries in the city.

Members of the Burbank City Council and Burbank Unified School Board discussed how to bring together city and school district resources to provide better education opportunities for Burbank students during a joint meeting on Monday.

Mayor Jess Talamantes said the idea was a “no-brainer,” while board member Roberta Reynolds said it would be a “tremendous benefit” for students.

The goal of the concept, brought forward by school board Vice President Steve Ferguson, is to have the identification cards of the nearly 15,000 students in the district double as their library card at local public libraries, said Elizabeth Goldman, library services director for the city.

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Goldman added that the library can start collecting books or developing programs that coincide with various projects on which students are working.

Goldman explained a possible way to implement the program.

Before the start of the school year, the district would notify parents that their child’s identification card can grant them access to all the branches of the Burbank Public Library if parents choose include their child in the program.

“The school district would then need to share its data with the library so that we can have all those records in our system,” Goldman said. “We then create a library identification number for each student. It could be the same as their student identification number; it could be a library bar-code number. Each institution has its system, but as long as it’s unique, it’ll work.”

The library accounts would be linked to each student throughout the school year. Once the year is over, the library will review and update the accounts.

“It is a fairly straightforward process,” Goldman said.

However, there are several issues that the city and school district will face. Privacy is the biggest concern the city and school district have because each agency “is governed by different legislation,” Goldman said.

The school district falls under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, while the city is governed by the California Public Records Act.

“We would have to make sure that we have some documentation in place that the school district … is comfortable [with],” she said. “That would likely involve some kind of consent form that parents would be signing to be aware that they’re doing this, but that would be a discussion with people who have more knowledge on both laws than I do.”

Other issues the school district and city might run into are how they would go about transferring data from one system to another, which grade level they offer the service to, deciding if the service is benefiting students and determining the policies tied to the service, such as fines for missing or overdue books.

Ferguson said that he liked the idea of piloting the service with the roughly 4,500 middle-school students instead of issuing the cards to all 15,000 students in the school district.

“I understand the importance of literacy at a young age, through kindergarten to fifth grade, in particular,” he said. “But they don’t carry wallets.”

However, Councilwoman Emily Gabel-Luddy said that starting the pilot with elementary students would be a better option because they could try to encourage students to read and go to the library at a younger age.

She added that school libraaries are open only during school hours, but the convenience of having public libraries open every day and having summer reading programs could have a positive impact on young students.

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Anthony Clark Carpio, anthonyclark.carpio@latimes.com

Twitter: @acocarpio