I think I have talked about this before, but I wanted to bring this up again because it seems to be a trend with school libraries. Recently I read an article from the huffingtonpost that discussed how for this current school year Washington DC cut up to 58 librarians from schools with 300 kids or under. The article goes on to say that parents were outraged and that a lot of people are fighting to get this drastic cut overturned.
However, Washington DC isn't alone. All across the country school districts with tight budgets are making cut backs. Common Core and school testing created a demand for the school librarian, however; school districts just can't seem to afford all of us. So what do they do? They decide to put a sharing system in place. In other words, libraries have more than one librarian. Now at first this sounds awesome, but what it actually means is that you could have a librarian who works at two different schools. So on Monday you have one librarian, a different librarian for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and another different librarian for Friday. And this just leads to confusion. Not only is it hard to share a library with another librarian, but it is also difficult to keep track of your students and teachers. Imagine having to keep track of two different sets of teachers, two different sets of school rules, two different sets of students. Collaboration is very hard in these types of situations. If you work in one library for four days of the week and then another library for the last day it is really hard to establish a collaboration with teachers in that second library. Thus, students in that second library do not get the same instruction experience. It is also hard to create a rapport with students. If you only see the students one day a week it may be hard to remember names or other types of information that you would know if you saw them on a more regular basis. It gets kind of daunting.
Furthermore, communication always seems to get messed up in situations like these. A teacher tells the Monday librarian something, but the Tuesday Librarian has absolutely no idea about this and thus the teacher has to explain things all over again. Situations like these also lead to questions like, who orders the books? How do you organize the library if each librarian has different ideas? It also leads to confusion when you are trying to get a book on loan from another school library. If the school library has two librarians who do you email?
Granted, though this system is highly confusing I am happy that there is a system like this rather than just taking the library away from schools period. There are ways to make the system less confusion. First COMMUNICATION, COMMUNICATION, COMMUNICATION. Leave notes when you leave for the other librarians, have a school email for the library that way you don't have to deal with the who do you contact issue. Though this might not be the best solution, librarians are making it work, but it does lead me to wonder will this become the permanent situation of the future or will we go back to having a librarian dedicated to just one school?
LaJoie,
E. (2012, Aug 14). [Web log message]. Retrieved from
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/14/dc-schools-librarians_n_1753871.html
