SB 5242 (a media literacy and democracy bill) has passed the Senate and is now headed to the House!
A hearing has been scheduled for Friday March 19, 10:00 am for our bill. It will be heard by the Early Learning & K-12 Education Committee.
This bill is very important to advancing media literacy education in our state. In 2019, the Legislature created with new funding a media literacy grant program. These grants were available to teaching teams from individual school districts so that they could develop curriculum units that could be easily integrated into the core subjects of English language arts, social studies or health. For the past 2 years teams from districts across the state have received grants to create new curriculum materials. The grant program has been very successful!
Materials that have been created so far are available on Washington’s Open Education Resources.The funding from this bill will make it possible to continue the media literacy grant program that is now administered by OSPI. It will also make grant money available to form professional learning communities within or across districts to share successful practices and discuss and brainstorm challenges districts have been facing especially over this past year. Finally, it would make it possible to do something we haven’t been able to do for a long while and that is to fund two media literacy conferences, one in the east and one on the west side of our state.
Click Here to SIGN IN TO SUPPORT ONLY (link is active until 1 hour before hearing): https://app.leg.wa.gov/CSIRemote/Testimony/Form…
Click Here to SUBMIT WRITTEN TESTIMONY (link is active until 24 hours after hearing):https://app.leg.wa.gov/…/Testimony/WrittenTestimonyForm…
LINK TO THE BILL INFORMATION:https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=5242…
Northwest Alliance for Media Literacy 