Are School Librarians Expendable?
School librarians are on the chopping block as states and cities seek to cut their education budgets.
In New York City, education officials say that after several years in a row of cutting costs, freezing wages and eliminating extracurricular activities, they may have no choice but to turn to librarians. And with technological advances, education policy makers are rethinking how they view library services in general.
Do superintendents and principals see librarians as more expendable than other school employees? If so, why?
barbaric
Cutting and freezing librarians? Sheesh! Bad enough just to lay them off.
Joking aside, this sucks. NYC education officials priorities are just really messed up.
Cuts in Prince George’s County, Maryland
Half of the library media specialist jobs in PGCPS were cut in the FY2012 budget. The only schools that will have full-time librarians are the high schools (to avoid loss of accreditation – we pointed that out to the Superintendent and the BOE) and schools with more than 1000 students. Most of our schools will have library media specialists for two days per week next school year. None of our schools have aides any longer, so there will be no one staffing the libraries when the library media specialists are in their other schools.
Yes. Yes they are
Exceptionally expendable. At least in the short term. It’s a really easy cut to make that doesn’t have any direct effects on the school. Over time of course it’s a different issue. But you cut a teacher the impact is immediate.
Sad but true.
We made ourselves expendable
We made ourselves expendable when we went from being in the specialists rotation and teaching classes to flexible scheduling where we worked with the classroom teacher. The classroom teachers no longer got a break, plus they learned to do the librarian’s job.