CA's Merced High School Librarian Cuts On the Horizon
RSSBy Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 03/09/2010
Most of Merced Union High School District’s librarians may be heading for the chopping block after the California school system proposed eliminating four of the remaining five positions to ease budget concerns, according to the Merced Sun Star.
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The Merced Union High School District's Sequoia High School. |
While Merced Union High School District, which represents nine high schools just north of Fresno, CA., is not alone in its budget crisis, cutting media specialist positions is still a grave concern to educators who believe that removing these lamplighters from schools harm not just today’s students—but tomorrow’s adults.
“Never before have we had so much information bombarding us from so many different directions,” says Cassandra Barnett, president of the American Association of School Librarians. “So if you take away the people who can guide them through as they’re learning, that can have a profound effect on how well they can think for themselves and protect themselves from the vast amount of information thrown at them.”
Barnett notes that while media specialists can be invaluable to school assignments—learning how to navigate data can be important even later on in everyday life.
Another problem at the school level is that as media specialists lose positions or are stretched to service too many schools, collections in individual libraries are neglected.
“If you don’t have someone trained in making good selections, picking the best literature for the right ages, then you don’t have a good collection,” says Barnett. “And when collections are neglected like that, it will take you time to build it back.”
How school librarians fare is unknown until the Merced Union High School District holds its next board meeting on March 10, according to its Web site. Until then, the fate of their jobs—and potentially their students’ future—is in the air.
“This really does a disservice to our kids,” says Barnett.
