How many students lose?
Mar 27th, 2010 by Cathy Jo Nelson
Just read a tweet attributed to Joyce Valenza showing a Google Map of all the places where school librarians have been eliminated (though I could not track that tweet down so here is the one I saw). How very depressing! But instead of thinking “how many jobs cut” all I can think is “how many students (and yes even teachers and communities) lose?”
See the map here.
I wish I didn’t need to encourage folks to add locations to the map. But I think that is the point of the map, depressing as it very well may be.
THIS dear friends is why advocacy is so very important.
Okay, I agree that advocacy is vitally important – I’m on a committee for it, and I even helped present about it for our local county-wide institute day. But I’m disheartened to realize that our school boards don’t seem to care what we ACTUALLY do, just what they think we do. No matter how many times I get data, talk to them, show them that we are doing information literacy instruction, literature appreciation, affecting test scores, collaborating with and training teachers, managing equipment and materials, when it comes down to it, they find us (serving every child & staff member in the district, all year long) less important than afterschool sports and clubs (serving at most 1/8 of the students in the district, redundantly with the local park district). They don’t WANT my data, they want to believe that I read kids books and sit around all day, so that it is less painful for them to cut my job, my fellow librarians’ jobs, the library aides’ jobs, and the technologists’ jobs. I feel pretty disheartened to be considered “extra” when I work with every student in my school every week – and to be pitted against loss of art and music or class sizes of 40 as one-of-these-is-inevitable.