D.C. Officials Feel the Heat over Planned School Library Cuts [UPDATED]
A spring proposal by District of Columbia officials to eliminate more than 50 school librarian jobs for the next academic year has triggered a public relations nightmare for the city council, where the proposal originated.
PrintA spring proposal by District of Columbia officials to eliminate more than 50 school librarian jobs for the next academic year has triggered a public relations nightmare for the city council, where the proposal originated.
“Libraries have long been one of the really weak links in the District of Columbia Public Schools,” grassroots activist Peter MacPherson of the Capitol Hill Public Schools Parent Organization told American Libraries. Noting that more than 30 schools lack site-based librarians for the 2011–2012 academic year, MacPherson explained that members of the parents group determined to fight a spring decision by schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson to defund school librarian posts at schools with less than 300 students and let principals of larger schools decide whether to reallocate their librarians’ salaries. “If this situation were to remain unchanged, 58 schools would have no librarian,” MacPherson said. Altogether, there are 124 schools in the district.
Between 2005 and 2008, the parents group worked with the Capitol Hill Community Foundation and the Washington Architectural Foundation to raise $2.4 million for the renovation of eight school libraries. Washington Examiner columnist Jonetta Rose Barras reported April 10 on the fate of those new facilities, as well as improvements funded by Target Corporation and Capital One through the Heart of America Foundation.
Library ROI doubted
“We have invested in full-time librarians for the last three or four years and we haven’t seen the kind of payoff we’d like,” Henderson said in Barras’s column, adding, “We have pulled away from programs where we haven’t received a return on our investment.” On May 3, Washington Post Answer Sheet columnist Valerie Strauss joined the fray, speculating: “I guess that means they are going to have to change the DCPS website,” which lauds school libraries for “play[ing] an increasingly important role in the learning process” and citing research studies showing that “an active school library program run by a certified and trained school librarian makes a significant difference to student learning outcomes.”
With the city council about to mark up the school budget, ALA President Molly Raphael and American Association of School Librarians President Carl Harvey II sent letters May 2 to D.C. City Council Chair Kwame Brown. Harvey emphasized the school-library research touted—ironically—online by DCPS, while Raphael reminded Brown of Henderson’s recently unveiled district goal to increase reading proficiency. “How will you meet this goal if you deprive thousands of students of one of the most valuable educational resources needed for students to increase reading scores—a school librarian?”
MacPherson told American Libraries late on the afternoon of May 4 that there has been some movement behind the scenes as city council members continued to weigh school-district budget lines. He theorized that some may be influenced by the hundreds of phone calls they received the day before that demanded full funding for school libraries.
UPDATE, May 11: School-library advocate Peter MacPherson emailed American Libraries that, even though D.C. City Council Chair Kwame Brown is recommending that $1 million be added to help fund school librarians, “that sum does not even restore the existing status quo vis-à-vis library staffing.” A final city-council vote on the DCPS budget scheduled for May 15.
American Libraries, Fri, 05/04/2012 - 16:08
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Comments
School Librarians
Anybody who considers school librarians obsolete and having “nothing whatever to do” is seriously uninformed. For an excellent example of what a qualified school librarian adds to a school, I recommend following Buffy_Hamilton on Twitter. She (and thousands of other credentialed school librarians all around the country) work closely with teachers to help students acquire excellent information skills, working with both print and online information. I don’t know anything more important for future citizens of a digital world.
I was intrigued by Chancellor Henderson’s statement: “We have invested in full-time librarians for the last three or four years and we haven’t seen the kind of payoff we’d like.” What sort of return was she envisioning? Perhaps what she’s really saying is that schools with librarians didn’t increase their test scores sufficiently?
In this age of
In this age of do-it-yourself, can you imagine a 1st grader going to the library and trying to figure out where to find a book about puppies at her reading level? Who will show here that there are connections between fiction and non-fiction books about puppies and how to locate them? How to find other books similar to the last puppy book she read that she loved so much? Who is qualified to instruct her on how to use the library computer to look up other books by the same author? Will there be someone to show her the safest way to navigate and search the database online to find more information about puppies? Who in the school is qualified to decide which of the 10,000 books about puppies are worth making available to students? If our 1st grader has 32 other 1st graders with her when she visits the library, who will have 5 minutes to devote to the search for the newest magazine article on training your puppy? What about the 8th grader who only knows how to search with Google and relies on Wikipedia for his research paper on puppy breeding trends in the United States?
If you think a librarian is someone who sits behind a desk and date stamps books as they are checked out, then you clearly have not experienced the kind of quality library that Carnegie or even Thomas Jefferson had envisioned for this country. A library where students can go to explore learning on their own self-guided and self-directed terms but with the guiding hand of a trained professional is the kind of library that allows them to think and grow. If you don’t know the true value of a trained “librarian” then I can only assume you are one of the unfortunate students who went to one of the thousands of schools in our country that has chosen to eliminated its trained professional librarian. Let’s hope it’s not to late for the rest.
Librarians
Libraries are completely obsolete as central data storage points
Please stop funding libraries entirely.
Please stop training “librarians”.
There is nothing whatever for these people to do
I’ll bite Mike. Tell that to
I’ll bite Mike. Tell that to the millions of people who depend on library spaces as their primary access point for Internet access, no-charge media, free training in literacies from basic reading to technology and information evaluation, assistance finding and applying for jobs, learning the English language, navigating the path to citizenship, safe and welcoming spaces for those who otherwise would not have one during daytime hours… do I need to go on here? Your comment is on libraries as central information repositories, and while the centers are now everywhere librarians continue to consistently demonstrate their skill at filtering massive data to derive optimal applications. Since you clearly do not need a librarian, I’m sure you’ll have no trouble locating the immense body of research (not to mention informal discussion among information management or human computer interaction scholarly circles) on the web showing how inclusively valuable the library is to diverse populations. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you about the wealth of authoritative research to be found in rich databases, which cost a fortune to the individual but are free at local libraries of all shapes and sizes. If you don’t know what a 21st-Century library does for people I suggest you visit the one nearest you and seek out qualitative information from your community.
Too obvious. I’ll give you a
Too obvious. I’ll give you a 2/10 — but only because you got someone to bite.
obsolete minds
Really Mike? Maybe libraries may be considered obsolete as central data storage points (an opinion you hold, but you do not say why you hold this opinion). And that is all you see that “librarians” are? There are many more things that libraries and librarians are and do - especially in schools. I wonder if you ever visited your high school or university (if you went) library. Perhaps your comments are of a generational nature. I currently have a library “student” as an intern. She is 22. She has only been to her university library ONCE in 2 years and doesn’t read much or at all. Still, she thinks she can teach research skills and she thinks she can talk to kids about reading (and promoting reading and literacy) - even though she is not even as well-read as the students. So I am not sure. Perhaps there is a generational attitude that libraries are obsolete. I personally think that traditional libraries have changed. I think that libraries have morphed and, we, as librarians need to teach kids how to navigate the new/21st century libraries (that are largely online).
So you think that libraries are obsolete as central data storage points. But you offer no background research in terms of scholarly journals or the like…seems you simply puke out an opinion off the cuff that you want people to accept (or is this a joke and you are flinging that out there tongue-in-cheek?). I don’t know. But what I teach my library research students is how to find topics, narrow focus, use keyword searches, recognize legitimate websites and question validity, find primary and secondary sources, and actually (since I was a technical writer), teach the kids how to write. So, according to your expert opinion, I have “nothing whatever for these people to do.”
Guess I’ll go eat worms.
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