…when a library aide can check out books?
Freehold, NJ (a.k.a. “Western Monmouth’s Family Town”) is cutting out the one librarian position left at their elementary school due to budget constraints. The $1.5 million in additional state aid that the Freehold Borough K-8 School District will receive in the 2008-09 school year “will not go as far as you think” said Board of Education President Jim Keelan. Keelan defended the board’s decision to cut the district’s one remaining librarian, even as parents and teachers questioned that move.
The board has adopted a $19.6 million budget for the 2008-09 school year, but apparently that does not include a school librarian.
Here’s the lamentable news.
school librarians
As a person who has been studying to be a school librarian for the past couple of years, this news is truly disheartening. It seems to me that as schools are being asked to pick up more and more of the slack from underfinanced social agencies (we now provide counselors, medical screenings, dental clinics etc.) their focus is sometimes forced away from the primarary role of schools: a child’s education.