Michigan's Certified LibrariansAre Endangered Species

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By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 04/05/2010

After working as an English teacher, elementary physical education instructor, computer lab educator, and debate coach, certified school librarian Deb Larsen decided to call it quits—picking April 9th as her last day as a librarian and teacher in Michigan state.

Deb Larsen (middle) with Teri Terry (right), past president of the Michigan Association for Media in Education (MAME) and Lynn Gordon, MAME president at the association's state conference.

“I didn’t teach the same class for more than two years in a row,” says Larsen, who, after working as a teacher in Michigan’s Bellaire Public Schools since 1992, has taken another job with the Michigan Education Association (MEA), one of the state’s teacher unions, to advocate for media specialists. “I have decided it’s enough. It’s too frustrating to watch what happens in this district.”

Larsen isn’t alone. While media specialists across the country are watching their jobs disappear amid nationwide budget cuts, Michigan’s school librarians were a fairly rare bunch to begin with, according to stats from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).

The state had one media specialist, or full-time equivalent, for every 1,088 students in the 1997-1998, according to NCES. That dropped to one for every 1,556 students in the 2007-2008 school year, compared to one media specialist for every 906 students in the nation the same school year.

“What we are seeing in Michigan is a decline in the number of teacher librarians,” says Karen Schulz, a spokesperson for the MEA. “And we suspect that the numbers will get worse, but that’s anecdotal.”

Not to Larsen, who has been told it’s going to take four people to replace the position she held as athletic director and the three classroom teaching spots she currently fills. But there are no plans, she says, to fill the library media position she was originally hired for in 1992. She finds it curious that teachers are hired to teach English, mathematics, science, and even physical education in her district—but informational literacy is expected to be self-taught.

“Administrators are in a pickle,” she says. “They know they need to man classrooms, but they don’t think about the higher thinking skills that go with electronic media. And they also think students are born with a computer in their hands, and so they can determine what’s relevant or not by themselves.”