Chicago Schools Trade Librarians for Other Staff

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By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 05/18/2009

School librarians fail to make the cut in some Chicago Public Schools, leaving classroom teachers left to fill the staffing gaps by building classroom-reading rooms.

John J. Pershing West Middle School in Chicago has never had a school librarian in its four-year history.

Take John J. Pershing West Middle School, which has never had a librarian in its four-year history. Principal Cheryl Watkins instead feels financial resources are better spent on a full-time arts educator and health and physical education teacher, rather than a half-time librarian, she says. “I made a decision around instruction,” says Watkins. “And I did not have funding for a full-time librarian.”

Pershing’s school library is staffed instead by teachers who come in and use the reference materials with classes. And the student council, Watkins adds, is working this year to broaden the school library with more books.

At the school, more attention is on feeding classroom libraries—which are often organized by reading level for students. In fact, Watkins does allocate money each year for teachers to add to their classroom collections, she says, as her funds only stretch so far.

That’s not news to Paul Whitsitt, director of the Department of Libraries and Information Services for the Chicago Public Schools, who says schools and councils basically have the ultimate power to decide how funds are spent on site.

“That’s often up to the principal,” he says. It explains in part why 100 schools in the district do not have a full-time or even half-time librarian on staff, although Whitsitt notes that’s rare at the high school level, and more common in elementary schools.

While some of the sites do have a school library, they’re run without a certified media specialist to oversee the collection or shape resources for students, teachers, and classroom instruction. Understaffed libraries can even start losing control of materials, and watch books disappear out the door.

Certainly spare school budgets, fairly common nationwide, only accommodate so much staffing. And Chicago Public Schools is expected to face some cuts this year, too, says Whitsitt. “But they say they’re doing everything they can so that it’s not felt at the school level,” he adds.

For those schools that do choose to outfit a school library, and not just classroom collections, grants of $5,000 exist, says Whitsitt. “But they have to show they’ve spent that much money already,” he says. “And the grants are competitive.”

While Whitsitt notes that there’s no state mandate demanding a school library or librarian in each school, he believes that students need to be around good-quality libraries and books. “I don’t see it as an either-or,” he says. “But it is a struggle to find funding to maintain high-quality library collections.”