U-Hi senior leaves her mark
Teen raises library funds, aids in hurricane relief
Molly Wakeling, a University High School senior, is spending her summer trying to change the world – at least as much as one teenager can.
She’s in Waveland, Miss., this week with Catholic Charities helping rebuild a small community devastated by Hurricane Katrina three years ago. It is her second summer trip for hurricane relief.
Last week, she spent two hours at a Liberty Lake supermarket campaigning for better funding for public school libraries, and before that she went to Spokane’s South Hill Library for the same purpose.
She has gathered nearly 150 signatures on a petition calling for increased funding.
Several months ago, she joined a group of adults on a visit to Olympia to convince lawmakers to increase school library funding. The group succeeded in gaining an additional $4 million for the coming year.
“I’m really into that ‘Let’s make a difference’ kind of thing,” she said. “I think it’s really cool we can go out and talk to legislators and they listen to us.”
Molly is volunteering with a grassroots effort in the Spokane area that was started by a group of moms last November. The moms sat around a kitchen table and came up with a plan to reverse what they argue is a serious decline in public funding for school libraries and information technology.
They formed the Washington Coalition for School Libraries and Information Technology and gained national recognition from the American Association of School Librarians, which gave them an award last month. Among their goals is securing full-time access for schoolchildren “to school libraries and a certified teacher librarian to provide a competitive education in information technology and literacy.”
The group hopes to gather 10,000 signatures on a petition to state officials.
Molly said she learned about the effort through her former Broadway Elementary School library teacher, Kathy Kalich, who is now at Wilson Elementary School on the South Side.
The daughter of Erik and Jill Wakeling, Molly and her two sisters were raised to value books and reading.
Jill Wakeling has been a library volunteer at Broadway since Molly was enrolled there, and she and Kalich became friends as a result.
“The girls love to read,” Jill Wakeling said.
Molly, she said, is the kind of person who wants to get involved and can’t say “no.”
She’s on the U-Hi debate team. She participates in the Knowledge Bowl. She plays cello and vibraphone in the orchestra and band, in addition to her volunteer work for library funding and hurricane relief.
“Molly’s the one who has taken the ball and run with it,” Jill Wakeling said.
At the South Hill Library in Spokane, Molly and a friend, Amanda Matte, gathered 53 signatures. Everyone she approached signed the petition, she said, because people using libraries recognize the importance of library funding in schools.
Last week at an Albertsons store in Liberty Lake, Molly and a group of coalition leaders gathered another 95 signatures in two hours. The petition now has 7,400 signatures, she said.
A staff reporter for the School Library Journal, based in New York, came to the Spokane area last week to interview the group for a story, she said.
“I think people really want changes in the education system,” Molly said.
She said she is interested in a career in education and maybe going into legislative politics.
Lisa Layera Brunkan, co-chair of the WCS-Lit coalition, described Molly as an “extremely articulate teenager.”
Molly said that work with the coalition is “definitely getting me more involved” in what she calls “this great American thing we have a right to.”