As school districts work to accommodate budget shortfalls, teachers aren’t the only education professionals to be let go or reshuffled. Librarians along with arts teachers and music program directors, are more vulnerable. And as advances in technology and the wealth of information available online can appear to make rooms filled with books obsolete, librarians find themselves on the chopping block more and more often.
The susceptibility of librarians and other school support staff also comes as states pass laws revising the rules that govern the hiring and firing of education professionals. Where the job security of teachers has depended on seniority until now, a new focus on teacher accountability ties their evaluations to test scores.
Unlike other subjects, students are not routinely tested for their library skills. They play a very important role for the students, they’re professionals who know how to do the research, and they get to make connections with all of the students in the building instead of those assigned to them in the classroom.
But today’s school libraries are more than just places to check out books. No longer tangential to the school, libraries are classrooms and technological hubs.
Librarians do more than help with the occasional research project or hard-to-find items; they are teacher librarians who follow state and federal curricula to teach students how to find, interpret and use information.
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